Making instructions “visible” on the interface: an approach to learning fault diagnosis skills through guided discovery

A Training Approach to the Acquisition and Retention of Fault-Finding Skills: Making Instructions "Visible" on the Interface

“…Other studies can experiment with additional diagnostic signs and contribute to the development of a more complete classification. Rate and sequence of recovery were not studied in this experiment, whereas high-level and landmark variables were included in a previous study by Kontogiannis and Linou (2001). It should be noted, however, that an emphasis on high-level variables (e.g., energy and mass flows) would be more appropriate for an ecological approach that uses the constraints of the system as a basis of design (Vicente & Rasmussen, 1990).…”

“…Higher order variables, such as energy flows (Vicente, 1999), minimize the requirement for calculating the combined influence of lower level variables (e.g., flow rates and temperature gradients). A similar effect is achieved by "landmark" variables (Kontogiannis & Linou, 2001) where a single variable (e.g., the tank level of a product) may be indicative of a system function (e.g., plant inventory). On the other hand, variables may differ in terms of the type of inferences drawn by operators.…”

“…An earlier study by Kontogiannis and Linou (2001) showed better transfer of fault-finding skills when a set of instructions and principles of operation were represented on the interface. These diagnostic signs were supplemented with verbal instructions about plant theory so that trainees could discover for themselves a set of heuristics for fault diagnosis.…”

“…Finally, the graphical format of telltale signs is very important in making diagnostic information "visible" to operators. Several useful formats have been proposed in the literature of human-computer interaction, including multiple trace recorders (Patrick & Haines, 1988), polar displays (Woods, Wise, & Hanes, 1981), configural displays (Bennett, Toms, & Woods, 1993), causal arrows (Heuer et al, 1995), symbols of direction of change (Elzer, Beuthel, Boussoffara, Zinser, & Tissen, 1995;Guerlain, Jamieson, Billemer, & Blair, 2002), linking bars between variables (Pawlak & Vicente, 1996), and "side-by-side" instruments (Kontogiannis & Linou, 2001). This study focuses mainly on the different types of telltale signs and proposes to use diagnostic heuristics as a basis for specifying the content of diagnostic information.…”

“…Another category proposed in Table 1 concerns the "similarity of change" between two or more variables. Kontogiannis and Linou (2001) used "side-by-side" instruments to display together variables that changed in the same direction. In this study, "shaded bars with symbols" have been used as a means to indicate whether a profile of three temperatures in a column would change in the same direction with another profile of temperatures at the input side of the plant.…”