Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011 - rees2009

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) Página 371 de 957
negative emotions or emotional instability, extraversion or the tendency to seek
interaction and stimulation from others, and openness or an appreciation and desire for
ideas and new experiences and a tendency towards adventure (John & Stivastava, 1999). It
also included measures of traditional masculinity and femininity, agency or the striving for
elevation and social dominance, communion or the striving for collaboration and the
preservation of social bonds (Ward et al., 2006). The survey also measured individuals
orientation towards mechanisms of social influence i.e. rule orientation wherein an
individual is oriented towards compliance with authority, role orientation where an
individual seeks out people and things that are attractive to identify with, and value
orientation where an individual searches for values that match their own (Kelman, 2006).
Finally, the survey measured students’ mechanical aptitude or intuition for the function of
mechanisms and machines and spatial aptitude or understanding of spatial relations and
their person orientation or orientation to interpersonal interaction and thing orientation.
These scales were reduced to provide a score on each of these variables for each student.
Correlations between these scores and person and thing orientation were then calculated.
Findings and Conclusions
The analyses described above revealed that person orientation was strongly related to
other variables involved in interpersonal interaction i.e. openness (r = .18, p < .001);
extraversion (r = .35, p < .001); conscientiousness (r = .11, p < .001); agreeableness (r =
.25, p < .001); femininity (r = .45, p