Exploiting Peer Review in Microteaching Through the Ld-Feedback App in Teacher Education

This paper presents a case study in which student-teachers practiced microteaching in the form of peer-teaching. They collaboratively developed a learning design, implemented it as a micro-lesson i.e. as a simulated teaching session and later they participated in a structured peer review activity. In particular, students initially used the Integrated Learning Design Environment to organize their task and its integrated WebCollage editor for authoring the learning design. Then these particular designs were implemented as a micro-lesson during which the authors of the design “taught” their peers who played the role of the students. After each micro-lesson, the Ld-Feedback application was used so that the student-teachers who practiced the microteaching got feedback from their peers regarding both the design and the implementation. This paper focuses on the first phase of the peer review activity explaining the use of the Ld-Feedback App and investigating the added value of involving student-teachers in creating feedback forms to evaluate their learning designs. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG

Effect of ozone, thunderstorms and other weather conditions on the respiratory function of asthmatics

There is concern that exposure to the air pollutant ozone may adversely affect respiratory function. Ozone is formed photochemically by the action of sunlight on pre-cursor pollutants and peak concentrations usually occur during spells of hot sunny weather in summer. There is also evidence that summer thunderstorms may exacerbate asthma. In order to investigate the possible effects of ozone and summer weather conditions on asthma a panel of 29 patients was recruited from outpatients from a hospital asthma clinic in Norfolk. Daily morning peak-flow measurements (pre-medication) were analysed for June, July and August 1994. For each subject the daily measurements were expressed as the percentage of their best peak-flow and the average for the whole panel was then calculated. Daily ozone measurements from the national air pollution monitoring site at Sibton and data on weather conditions in Norwich were also collected. Multiple regression analysis was used to examine the association between daily peak flow, ozone and a number of weather variables, including the occurrence of thunderstorms, with lags of up to 5 days. A significant positive association (p<0.001) was found between peak flow and temperature over the previous 3 days. Peak flow was significantly negatively associated with the number of days with thunder in the previous 5 days (p=<0.001), the number of days with poor ozone (at or above 90 ppb) in the last 3 days (p<0.001) and the number of days with rain in the last 4 days (p<0.001). These 4 variables explained 48% of the variance in daily peak flow. The model estimate is that each day of poor ozone is associated with a change in peak flow (as % of best) of -1.07 (95% c.i. -1.52, -0.63) and each day with thunder -0.70 (95% c.i. -0.98, -0.43). During the summer period studied there was therefore evidence of small, but statistically significant adverse effects of ozone, thunderstorms and wet weather on the respiratory function of asthmatics in Norfolk