3234 APPENDIX D. HOW TO USE THIS BOOK – SOME ADVICE FOR TEACHERS

greater benefit for you later. In fact, one might argue than an educational experience tailored around one’s strengths will only set up students for later failure when they enter less accommodating environments. One can easily imagine an educational environment in which nothing is presented to you that doesn’t cater to your strengths, and then the utter shock experienced when you step into your new role as a technical employee only to discover you must continue to learn without this assistance.

3.The third error is that the student’s learning style is simply assumed to be fixed for life. I have never read nor heard anyone suggest alter someone’s learning style. How do we know this to be true?

It is an incontrovertible fact that the field of Instrumentation requires continuous learning and skill improvement. This is true for any field subject to the evolution of technology and of applications. It is also an incontrovertible fact that life does not adjust itself to suit our proclivities, and as such it would be unreasonable to expect to have one’s learning style accommodated throughout a career.

Suppose learning styles are both real and immutable: a person who is simply unable to learn in multiple ways is therefore unsuitable for this career and should not even bother pursuing it. Suppose learning styles are real but malleable: this would mean the educational program has an obligation to challenge the student’s learning styles in order to make them a more versatile learner. Suppose learning styles aren’t real, but are merely preferences: in this case our best option is to ignore them entirely lest we cripple our students’ futures by accommodating something that isn’t real.

I have yet to meet a student who was willing to give up their career in Instrumentation because they were convinced their learning style made reading (or any other learning activity) impossible. I have also never met a student would failed to accomplish what their learning style ostensibly prohibited. At the risk of sounding cynical, I am convinced learning styles are far too often used as excuses for avoiding challenges.

D.7.8 Fallacy: reductionistic course design

This fallacy finds itself embedded into the very structure of modern American higher education, and may be defined in the context of this discussion as the belief that understanding the constituent parts necessarily results in understanding the whole. Programs of study are most often made up of a series of discrete courses, each one encapsulating a particular topic, and often taught by di erent instructors with widely varying standards of achievement. This design is not born out of a concern for maximizing learning, but rather is the result of optimizing school enrollment. Simply put, it is far easier to manage enrollment at a college where students are free to choose from a smorgasbord of courses and instructors are regarded as fungible assets for the delivery of these courses, than it is to manage enrollment with monolithic programs of study.

Some areas of study are amenable to teaching in reductionist fashion. Certain mathematical topics (e.g. trigonometry) as well as certain discrete skills (e.g. sensor calibration) lend themselves well to dedicated courses. Other areas, however, do not. When the knowledge or skill in question spans a wide range of applications and involves changes of habit, one course in that subject is rarely su cient.

A good example of this is safety. You can hardly find a workplace program that doesn’t include a safety course, but yet this is a terrible way to teach safety. While it’s possible to convey certain safety

procedures and knowledge in a single course, many safety applications require extensive knowledge in other areas (e.g. electricity, chemistry) and so must be addressed at multiple points in a program of study. Moreover, safety is first and foremost a matter of attitude and habit, and as such requires persistent emphasis over long periods of time to fully cultivate.

Another good example of this is troubleshooting. Like safety, the ability to diagnose faults in complex systems requires specific knowledge of those systems and therefore troubleshooting must be taught at multiple points throughout any complex program of study. Also like safety, troubleshooting necessitates the cultivation of certain mental habits and attention to detail that requires persistent e ort over long periods of time.

In short, topics such as safety and troubleshooting are simply too complex and too important to relegate to single courses.

Another problem is abstraction: cognitive research reveals how di cult it is for students to absorb a concept and then apply that one concept to a multitude of di erent applications. One of the dangers of reductionism is that concepts may be taught in complete isolation from their practical contexts, which the hope that students will “make the leap” from general principle to application, but this is a tall order. It is far more e ective in my experience to embed important concepts into multiple lessons across the program in order to reinforce those concepts and help students learn to see how that abstract concept gets applied.

Another problem with reductionist program design is the di culty of maintaining consistently high standards across the entirety of a program. This problem is especially pronounced when temporary faculty are employed to teach these courses. If students know what some faculty teaching a subject are easier than other faculty teaching that same subject, you create pathways of least resistance where the students who most need challenging instruction in order to develop as thinkers don’t get it.

3236 APPENDIX D. HOW TO USE THIS BOOK – SOME ADVICE FOR TEACHERS

D.8 Summary

To summarize some of the key points and concepts for teaching:

•Do not waste class time transmitting facts to students – let the students research facts outside of class

•Use class time to develop high-level thinking skills (e.g. problem-solving, diagnostic techniques, metacognition)

•Use Socratic dialogue to challenge each and every student on the subject matter

•Focus on general principles, not specific procedures

•Make labwork as realistic as possible

•Build diagnostic skill by first exercising deductive reasoning, as a prelude to inductive reasoning

•Incorporate frequent troubleshooting exercises in the lab, with students diagnosing realistic faults in instrument systems

•Include a broad range of practical topics and aspects in all coursework rather than fall into the convention of focusing on memorizing definitions, stating concepts, and performing quantitative calculations

•Assess student learning validly and rigorously

•Review important knowledge and skill areas continually until graduation – build this review into the program courses themselves (homework, quizzes, exams) rather than relying on ad hoc review

One final piece of advice for educators at every level: it is better to teach a few things well than to teach many things poorly! If external constraints force you to “cover” too much material in too little time, focus on making each learning exercise as integrative as possible, so students will experience di erent topics in ways that reinforce and give context to each other.

E.1 Error corrections

Abdelaziz, Ahmed (June 2014)

• Identified numerous typographical errors throughout the book, mostly repeated repeated words.

Ames, Ben (January 2015)

• Identified typographical error in the Problem-Solving and Diagnostic Strategies chapter.

Balbaa, Amr (May 2015)

• Identified mathematical error in the Continuous Fluid Flow Measurement chapter.

Barton, Bruce (January 2015, March 2015, April 2015)

•Identified typographical errors in the Discrete Control Elements chapter regarding solenoid valve construction, in the Process Dynamics and PID Controller Tuning chapter, and also in the Digital Data Acquisition and Networks chapter.

Brierly, Ryan (April 2016)

•Identified typographical error in the Physics chapter regarding transition points between laminar and turbulent flow regimes.

Brown, Kevin (February 2011)

• Identified typographical error in the Control Valves chapter.

Bultsma, Brent (September 2011-June 2012)

• Identified multiple typographical errors throughout the book.

Chong, Yi-Vonne (August 2017)

• Identified typographical error in a protective relay wiring diagram.

Douglas, Jon (Spring 2017)

•Suggested the inclusion of self-purged impulse lines to the book and provided documentation of this practice from industry.

Mandegari, Abdolkarim (February 2022)

•Suggested a clarification on altering the bench-set range of a control valve for the sake of splitranging, to note that a factory-engineered bench-set must be chosen rather than an attempt to field-modify the valve’s bench-set range for the sake of proper valve performance and seat load.

Marques, Tiago (July 2012)

•Identified lack of origin lines in linear graphs where 4-20 mA signals are related to practical measurement ranges (Analog Electronic Instrumentation chapter).

Morgan, Clayton (August 2018)

• Identified typographical error in the (Continuous Pressure Measurement chapter).

Mhyre, Phil (January 2012)

• Identified spelling error on the word “desiccant” (Discrete Control Elements chapter).

Nobiling, David (July 2016)

•Identified typographical error in the (Digital data acquisition and networks chapter), where the terms “PLC” and “VFD” were interchanged.

Pulido, Alberto (May 2012)

•Identified conceptual error regarding Fieldbus terminator resistor packages (FOUNDATION Fieldbus Instrumentation chapter).

Sangani, Champa (September 2009) and Brainard, Ben (January 2012)

•Identified calculation error in milliamp-to-pH scaling problem (Analog Electronic Instrumentation chapter).

Saxton, Trevor (August 2015)

•Identified mathematical errors in the “Phasor Arithmetic” section of the (AC Electricity chapter).

•Identified error in PID tuning response for a “generic” simulated process in the Process Dynamics and PID Controller Tuning chapter.

Wingerter, John (January 2017)

•Identified an oversight in explaining safety considerations during control valve disassembly, in the Disassembly of a Sliding-Stem Control Valve appendix.

Young, Jeanne (April-May 2012)

•Identified errors in proximity switch wire color codes and suggested correction in the

Programmable Logic Controllers chapter.

•Identified pattern inconsistent with industry convention in motor control circuit schematic diagrams within the Discrete Control Elements chapter.

Ziels, Matt (October 2018)

• Suggested adding lock-out/tag-out procedure to transmitter manifold valves.

E.2 New content

Coy, John J. et. al. (December 2012)

•Sampled graphic illustrations from his NASA Reference Publication “Gearing” (1152), showing di erent types of gear trains for inclusion in the Simple Machines section of the Physics chapter. This NASA document, being a US government publication unclassified and approved for “unlimited” distribution, lies within the public domain and so may be freely sampled into other works such as this one.

Dennis, Japheth (2011-2012 academic year)

•Suggested additional examples of PID controller responses to graph, to help illustrate the unique features of each action.

Faydor, L. Litvin et. al. (December 2012)

•Sampled 5-planet planetary gear set illustration from his NASA publication “New Design and Improvement of Planetary Gear Trains”, for inclusion in the Simple Machines section of the Physics chapter. This NASA document, being a US government publication unclassified and approved for “unlimited” distribution, lies within the public domain and so may be freely sampled into other works such as this one. Also sampled helicopter transmission gear set illustration from his NASA publication “Handbook on Face Gear Drives With a Spur Involute Pinion”.

Goertz, Kevin (2006-2007 academic year)

• Took photographs of various flowmeters, control valves, and an insertion pH probe assembly.

Larsen, Dayn (April 2018)

• Identified typographical errors in the (Digital Data Acquisition and Networks chapter).

Marshall, Travis (2012-2013 academic year)

•Contributed analogy of a “shadow” to the explanation of absorption spectroscopy, after helping to install a laser stack gas analyzer during a summer internship and helping to explain that instrument’s operating principle to himself.

Poelma, John (2010-2011 academic year)

•Took photographs of various pressure vessels, instruments, control valves, and other process hardware at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.