Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN) Pathway

The Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN) Pathway will steward a broad collection of educational resources that facilitate students, teachers, and citizens becoming climate literate and informed about “the climate’s influence on you and society and your influence on climate.”  The focus of our efforts are to integrate the effective use of the resources across all educational levels – with a particular focus on the middle-school through undergraduate levels (grades 6-16) as well as to citizens through formal and informal education venues and communities.  

In the first six months of the project we have moved toward our initial goal of having a live collection by Nov 1, 2010.  This has involved a range of activities.  The most important of which include:

1. Establishment of the review criteria for resources to be included in the first review round.
2. Establishment and implementation of the review process.
3. Website development
   • CLEAN Pathway Portal – live site: http://www.cleanet.org
   • Climate Literacy Network – live site: http://www.cleanet.org/cln
   • Development of online Review Tool, CLEAN Pathway and Advisory Board workspaces

1. Establishment of the reveiw criteriia for resources to be included in the first review round

The establishment of the review criteria for the CLEAN Pathway Collection began with an examination of the review criteria applied to educational resources in various other digital libraries and collections.  These included the review criteria for the NSDL SERC, and Merlot collections.  We integrated these review criteria into our first draft review criteria.  These were then customized to directly address the special aspects of our collection process.  This included an initial alignment of resources with either the Climate Literacy: Essential Principles of Climate Science or the Energy Awareness Principles (developed by CLEAN project members).  In addition, in order to simplify our first round of review (three rounds are planned under the current funding), while we are establishing the review criteria and the review and cataloging processes, we are vetting only educational activities.  For our purposes an educational activity is defined as a relatively brief set of instructional materials that is presented as a whole, where all the parts and ideas are linked and part of the same activity.  In review rounds 2 and 3 we will broaden the scope (e.g. Podcasts, Videos, Demonstrations, Courses, Curriculum.) 

The Review Questionnaire contains all the review criteria established for the CLEAN Collection.  This questionnaire has been built into the online review tool used by the reviewers which is described later. It covers three major areas including 1) scientific accuracy, 2) pedagogical effectiveness, and 3) technical quality and ease of use.

2. Establishment and implementation of the review process

The review process began with the identification of online pools of potential resources through conversation with project staff, the advisory board, the Climate Literacy Network, and posting the opportunity for anyone in the community to suggest a resource.  Eight members of the CLEAN Pathway project staff have served as Resource Collectors whose main responsibility has been to shepherd resources through the review process.   The first step in the review process was an informal and formal triage process.  In the informal triage process the Resource Collectors would examine resources in the various online resource pools and determine whether a resource might be appropriate for the CLEAN Pathway collection.  Those that passed this stage were entered into the online review tool.  Those that did not were lost to further consideration and were not tracked. 

For those resources that were entered into the review system a more formal triage review was conducted.  In this round Resource Collectors answered, in the review tool, questions about what primary principles (either Climate Literacy Essential Principle or Energy Awareness Principle) were addressed by the resource; the type of resource (e.g., activity, video, reference, curriculum, course); the audience level as stated by the resource; and whether the Resource Collector recommended either 1) the resource be reviewed; 2) the resource be held for consideration in a later round of review; or 3) the resources is not appropriate for the CLEAN collection. 

In the first round of review the Resource Collector who entered a resource into the online review tool was responsible for conducting the first formal review.  In the formal review, three areas were addressed—Scientific Accuracy, Pedagogical Effectiveness, and Technical Quality/Ease of Use with both Likert scale questions and comment boxes. 

Each resource that achieved an overall recommendation of high or medium priority in the first round of review underwent a second round of review. Both reviews are available online in the review tool.

In addition to the review conducted by the Resource Collectors, we are conducting an additional science review by a scientist with sufficient scientific expertise on the topic of the resource.  To date we have explicitly limited our science reviewers to those who have science PhDs. 

Resources that were recommended at the high or medium priority level in both reviews were moved on to the Review Camp.  The Review Camp was held July 26-28, 2010 and involved 10 external reviewers (educators and scientists) and 14 CLEAN staff .  At the Review Camp, six teams (each made up of four participants and each having at least one of the following areas of expertise: educator, scientist, and Resource Collector) each worked together to determine which of their ~24 assigned resources should be cataloged into the CLEAN Pathway collection.  The teams finalized annotations for each resource based on the comments of all reviewers and the team discussions and noted the reasons a particular resource did not make the cut.

It is estimated that the Resource Collectors considered over 1000 resources.  519 of these were entered into the review tool.  Following the first and second round of review 142 were moved forward to the Review Camp.  Of the 142 considered at the Review Camp 99 passed the review, 18 were passed for further consideration to an editorial team (the CLEAN PI’s), and 32 did not pass the review.

3. Web Developments

The CLEAN Pathway portal is housed on the Science Education Resource Center’s (SERC’s) Content Management System (CMS).  We have created two live sites (CLEAN Pathway Portal: http://www.cleanet.org and the Climate Literacy Network: http://www.cleanet.org/cln), two workspaces (CLEAN Pathway project staff workspace and the CLEAN Pathway Advisory Board workspace), and the online review tool. 

The CLEAN Pathway Portal live site. This site currently indicates that it is a placeholder for the collection which is expected to go live in November 2010.  It also includes links to 1) more information about the project, 2) the Climate Literacy Network website and the Climate Literacy: Essential Principles of Climate Science, and 3) a form to allow community members to suggest resources to be considered for the CLEAN Pathway collection.

The Climate Literacy Network site.  The Climate Literacy Network site was moved to the cleanet.org servers and domain when the CLEAN Pathway project was funded.  This site provides 1) the content of the published Climate Literacy: Essential Principles of Climate Science; 2) descriptions of the 38 Climate Change Education Projects funded by NSF, NASA, and NOAA collected from the participants at the NSF Climate Change Education PI meeting in March 2010, and the NASA Global Climate Change Education PI meeting in April 2010 along with a form to allow other such projects to submit their information to be included; 3) a teleconference schedule with agendas; and 4) a section for online discussions.  The Climate Literacy Network meets by teleconference weekly to share information on climate science and climate literacy, with a focus on educational contexts (formal and informal) but also including discussions about impacts on community groups and ordinary citizens.  The Listserv currently has over 190 individuals and the teleconference regularly has 15-25 participants.  We continue to get input on the CLEAN Pathway project from this group.