Cognitive dissonance during engineering design

We examined changes in engineering students' perceived challenges during a semester-long design project to identify the most salient challenges they experienced and when they occurred. We hypothesized that patterns in students' perceived challenges in key areas would take the form of multiple, overlapping waves reflective of the desire to stabilize the problem space. We collected longitudinal data from about 130 engineering students at five points during a semester, with some variation in sample size between time points. A series of Chi-square difference tests were conducted to examine changes in students' perceived challenges during the course of the project. The result of the study partially supports our hypothesized pattern of overlapping waves.