NOAA’s Office of Education is seeking reviewers

NOAA’s Office of Education is seeking reviewers for pre-applications and full applications to the 2018 Environmental Literacy Grants competition titled, “Supporting the education of K-12 students and the public for community resilience”. Due to a very large response to this funding solicitation, we are in need of additional reviewers with resilience expertise. Because we already have a sufficient pool of reviewers with education expertise, resilience experts do not necessarily need to have experience in education.



What a reviewer will do:

• Serve as a reviewer of pre-applications OR a reviewer of full applications. (Note: There may be a small number of people who serve as reviewers of both.)
  

• Read, write brief reviews of, and score applications that have been assigned to you.
  
• During the pre-application phase, we anticipate assigning 20-25 pre-applications per reviewer and we estimate that this will require approximately 25 hours of work over a ~4-week period.  (Pre-applications are brief, consisting of a title page and a 4-page narrative.)  During the full application phase, we anticipate assigning approximately 10-12 applications to you and we estimate your work will require about 40-60 hours over a 6 week period.
  

• Participate in a 90-minute teleconference with program officers who will overview the review process, highlight important elements of the funding announcement, and answer any reviewer questions. Teleconferences will be scheduled within the first two weeks of the review period (exact dates TBD).
  
• Reviewers of full applications will also participate in a 2-day virtual panel meeting the week of May  21-25 (exact dates TBD).
  

Time Frame


The review period for pre-applications will begin approximately January 8, 2018. Your written reviews and scores will be due by February 2, 2018. We may ask you to clarify your reviews between February 2 and February 16, so you will need to be available during this period as well. The review is entirely virtual and we will not convene a panel for this phase of the review.

The review period for full applications will occur April 16, 2018 - May 25, 2018, including a 2-day virtual panel meeting the week of May 21-25 (exact dates TBD).


Why serve?

• Reviewers will gain insights into the emergent field of resilience education.
  
• Reviewers will learn what makes a highly competitive grant application.
  

• Reviewers gain an understanding of how a federal grants review process works.
  

• Serving as a reviewer for a federal grants program is an important way the government solicits input from the community. This input informs investment decisions for the current year and future priorities.
  

If you are interested in serving as a reviewer, please complete the following survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3Q5SFYB by January 3. Please send your resume to oed.grants@noaa.gov. If you have any questions or comments, email the NOAA Environmental Literacy Program at oed.grants@noaa.gov.