Evidence of Participation in the Advancement of Knowledge from 25 Years of Publications for the GLOBE Program

The Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) Program was announced on Earth Day 1994 and began on Earth Day 1995. Over the first 25 years of its operation, there have been more than 600 formal publications and 340 conference presentations about the program, in at least 15 languages. As the 25th anniversary of the program approached, we began a focused effort to find and characterize those publications in order to better understand GLOBE’s impact to date as well as its future potential. GLOBE was envisioned from the beginning as a science and education program, so GLOBE publications cover a wide range of topics across Earth system science as well as in education and evaluation topics. To characterize the collection, a large set of dimensions was first identified from the literature, across science and education. These include codes related to: motivation and conception of the research investigation, educator practices and training, education outcomes & demonstration that these outcomes were achieved, data and study scope, characteristics of the investigation or its findings.
Application of these codes was first tested by three raters (the first three authors) on a subset of the publications, then refined to capture missing aspects. The full set of publications was then rated on the full set of criteria. As a second step, subsets of the collection with particularly in depth discussion of The GLOBE Program are now being analyzed in more detail. This poster will summarize various attributes of the GLOBE bibliography and identify areas of potential for further geoscience investigations.