Ida Ngambeki

Person and Thing Orientations: Psychological Correlates and Predictive Utility

Individuals differ in their orientation toward the people and things in their environment. This has consequences for important life choices. The authors review 15 studies on Person and Thing Orientations (PO-TO) using data from 7,450 participants to establish the nature of the constructs, their external correlates, and their predictive utility. These findings suggest that these two orientations are not bipolar and are virtually independent constructs. They differentially relate to major personality dimensions and show consistent sex differences, whereby women are typically more oriented toward people and men more oriented toward things. Additionally, these orientations influence personal preferences and interests. For university students, PO and TO uniquely predict choice of major and retention within thing-oriented fields (e.g., science and engineering).

Performance trajectory of students in the engineering disciplines

The purpose of this study is to examine differences in student performance among engineering disciplines, as measured by term GPAs. Results indicate that: 1) Women outperform men in most engineering disciplines; 2) Student performance starts low at the freshman level, drops slightly at the sophomore level, and then increases over the junior and senior levels (without controlling for mortality); 3) Significant differences in GPAs remain between majors after controlling for relative SAT score, academic class level, race, and gender; 4) After controlling for major, relative SAT score, academic class level, and race, the gender gap in performance grows even larger.

Evaluating Secure Programming Knowledge

Secure programming is a widely used term for programming robustly. Applying the principles and methodologies of this style of programming would significantly improve the quality of software in use today. Teaching students how to program robustly, or securely, is a first step towards this goal. This paper presents a concept map for secure programming and then some questions used to evaluate students’ knowledge of this subject. These questions have been given both before and after a term of programming, computer security, and other classes that cover this subject. In this paper, we discuss how the questions reveal the students’ understanding of material in the concept map, and what erroneous ideas the questions reveal.

Work in progress — Developing a curriculum to prepare engineers to participate in public policy

With the increasing proliferation of scientific knowledge and technological artifacts into society comes an increased need to regulate these artifacts and their use. The development and implementation of such regulations and laws in many cases requires both a technical understanding of the functioning of these artifacts and an understanding of how this technology interacts with social and natural systems, and would benefit from the involvement of a technical expert. Clearly, there is an important role to be filled by engineers in the public policy arena. However, there are very few engineers participating in public policymaking and very few engineering programs offer or encourage courses of study in policy. While there is agreement in the engineering education community that an increased focus on Engineering and Public Policy is a good idea, very little empirical evidence has been assembled to guide the establishment of these courses and programs. This paper reports on the development of an initiative at one university to develop a public policy curriculum for engineers that can easily be integrated into the existing engineering program.