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Provenance: Katie Boyd, University of Colorado at Boulder
Reuse: This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.

CLEAN Expert Science Reviewer Process & Certificates

The CLEAN Review process includes several steps to assess resources that are submitted to our database for scientific validity. The entire description of the review process can be viewed here (https://cleanet.org/clean/about/review.html). Once the resource has passed the five rounds of reviews by educators and scientists it is then sent out for an expert science review. The expert science reviewer checks the quality and accuracy of the scientific content of resource(s) in topics relevant to their field of study. The scientists fill out the science review form (Acrobat (PDF) 67kB Oct18 10) where they are asked to judge the quality of the resource and give suggestions about how to improve the science content, if necessary. If they feel that scientific shortcomings can be addressed in annotations (notes to the user), we include the resource and post the scientific comments on the public display of the CLEAN collection. However, if a scientist has major concerns about a resource, it will not be included in our collection. The scientist also decides if a resource covers cutting-edge science and needs to be revisited regularly to check if the science content is still current.

Expert science reviewers gain experience with the following:

• Reviewing educational material in their field for scientific accuracy 
• Contributing to student learning outcomes by ensuring quality and accuracy of educational materials 
• Gaining exposure to and evaluation of various pedagogical methods, such as teaching with technology, 5E lesson planning, inquiry-based learning, and place-based methods.   
• Engaging with climate literacy and educational resources and advancing the field of climate and energy education by making high quality resources accessible 
• Employing educational evaluation techniques to increase their knowledge of effective practices 
• Reflecting on pedagogical frameworks used in classrooms 

We appreciate our expert science reviewers, who aren't paid for their time and perform this work as 'service' for their profession. In exchange for their input, we offer certificates to document their engagement with CLEAN. The levels of review that can be achieved are:

• 1-3 review- bronze certificate 
• 3-5 reviews- silver certificate 
• 5+ reviews- gold certificate