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For two days in February 2018, 17 cybersecurity ed- ucators and professionals from government and in- dustry met in a “hackathon” to refine existing draft multiple-choice test items, and to create new ones, for a Cybersecurity Concept Inventory (CCI) and Cyber- security Curriculum Assessment (CCA) being devel- oped as part of the Cybersecurity Assessment Tools (CATS) Project. We report on the results of the CATS Hackathon, discussing the methods we used to develop test items, highlighting the evolution of a sample test item through this process, and offer- ing suggestions to others who may wish to organize similar hackathons. Each test item embodies a scenario, question stem, and five answer choices. During the Hackathon, par- ticipants organized into teams to (1) Generate new scenarios and question stems, (2) Extend CCI items into CCA items, and generate new answer choices for new scenarios and stems, and (3) Review and refine draft CCA test items. The CATS Project provides rigorous evidence- based instruments for assessing and evaluating educa- tional practices; these instruments can help identify pedagogies and content that are effective in teach- ing cybersecurity. The CCI measures how well stu- dents understand basic concepts in cybersecurity— especially adversarial thinking—after a first course in the field. The CCA measures how well students understand core concepts after completing a full cy- bersecurity curriculum.
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Creating a Cybersecurity Concept Inventory: A Status Report on the CATS Project
We report on the status of our Cybersecurity Assess- ment Tools (CATS) project that is creating and val- idating a concept inventory for cybersecurity, which assesses the quality of instruction of any first course in cybersecurity. In fall 2014, we carried out a Del- phi process that identified core concepts of cyber- security. In spring 2016, we interviewed twenty-six students to uncover their understandings and mis- conceptions about these concepts. In fall 2016, we generated our first assessment tool–a draft Cyberse- curity Concept Inventory (CCI), comprising approx- imately thirty multiple-choice questions. Each ques- tion targets a concept; incorrect answers are based on observed misconceptions from the interviews. This year we are validating the draft CCI using cognitive interviews, expert reviews, and psychometric testing. In this paper, we highlight our progress to date in developing the CCI. The CATS project provides infrastructure for a rig- orous evidence-based improvement of cybersecurity education. The CCI permits comparisons of different instructional methods by assessing how well students learned the core concepts of the field (especially ad- versarial thinking), where instructional methods re- fer to how material is taught (e.g., lab-based, case- studies, collaborative, competitions, gaming). Specif- ically, the CCI is a tool that will enable researchers to scientifically quantify and measure the effect of their approaches to, and interventions in, cybersecurity ed- ucation.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1819521
- PAR ID:
- 10110275
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- National Cyber Summit
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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