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1. Experiences and lessons learned creating and validating concept inventories for cybersecurity

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58703-1_1  

   Sherman, Alan T. ; Herman, Geoffrey L. ; Oliva, Linda ; Peterson, Peter A. ; Golaszewski, Enis ; Poulsen, Seth ; Scheponik, Travis ; Gorti, Akshita ( September 2020 , National Cyber Summit (NCS) Research Track 2020)

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   We reflect on our ongoing journey in the educational Cybersecurity Assessment Tools (CATS) Project to create two concept inventories for cybersecurity. We identify key steps in this journey and important questions we faced. We explain the decisions we made and discuss the consequences of those decisions, highlighting what worked well and what might have gone better. The CATS Project is creating and validating two concept inventories—conceptual tests of understanding—that can be used to measure the effectiveness of various approaches to teaching and learning cybersecurity. The Cybersecurity Concept Inventory (CCI) is for students who have recently completed any first course in cybersecurity; the Cybersecurity Curriculum Assessment (CCA) is for students who have recently completed an undergraduate major or track in cybersecurity. Each assessment tool comprises 25 multiple-choice questions (MCQs) of various difficulties that target the same five core concepts, but the CCA assumes greater technical background. Key steps include defining project scope, identifying the core concepts, uncovering student misconceptions, creating scenarios, drafting question stems, developing distractor answer choices, generating educational materials, performing expert reviews, recruiting student subjects, organizing workshops, building community acceptance, forming a team and nurturing collaboration, adopting tools, and obtaining and using funding. Creating effective MCQs is difficult and time-consuming, and cybersecurity presents special challenges. Because cybersecurity issues are often subtle, where the adversarial model and details matter greatly, it is challenging to construct MCQs for which there is exactly one best but non-obvious answer. We hope that our experiences and lessons learned may help others create more effective concept inventories and assessments in STEM. 

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2. Experiences and Lessons Learned Creating and Validating Concept Inventories for Cybersecurity (invited paper)

   Sherman, Alan T. ; Herman, Geoffrey L. ; Oliva, Linda ; Peterson, Peter A. ; Golaszewski, Enis ; Poulsen, Seth ; Scheponik, Travis ; Gorti, Akshita ( July 2020 , Proceedings of the 2020 National Cyber Summit)

   We reflect on our ongoing journey in the educational Cybersecurity Assessment Tools (CATS) Project to create two concept inventories for cybersecurity. We identify key steps in this journey and important questions we faced. We explain the decisions we made and discuss the consequences of those decisions, highlighting what worked well and what might have gone better. The CATS Project is creating and validating two concept inventories—conceptual tests of understanding—that can be used to measure the effectiveness of various approaches to teaching and learning cybersecurity. The Cybersecurity Concept Inventory (CCI) is for students who have recently completed any first course in cybersecurity; the Cybersecurity Curriculum Assessment (CCA) is for students who have recently completed an undergraduate major or track in cybersecurity. Each assessment tool comprises 25 multiple-choice questions (MCQs) of various difficulties that target the same five core concepts, but the CCA assumes greater technical background. Key steps include defining project scope, identifying the core concepts, uncovering student misconceptions, creating scenarios, drafting question stems, developing distractor answer choices, generating educational materials, performing expert reviews, recruiting student subjects, organizing workshops, building community acceptance, forming a team and nurturing collaboration, adopting tools, and obtaining and using funding. Creating effective MCQs is difficult and time-consuming, and cybersecurity presents special challenges. Because cybersecurity issues are often subtle, where the adversarial model and details matter greatly, it is challenging to construct MCQs for which there is exactly one best but non-obvious answer. We hope that our experiences and lessons learned may help others create more effective concept inventories and assessments in STEM. 

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3. The CATS Hackathon: Creating and refining test items for the cybersecurity concept inventories

   Sherman, A. T. ; Oliva, L. ; Golaszewski, E. ; Phatak, D. ; Scheponik, T. ; Herman, G. ; Choi, D. S. ; Offenberger, S. ; Peterson, P. A. ; Dykstra, J. ; et al ( January 2019 , IEEE security & privacy)

   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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4. Psychometric Evaluation of the Cybersecurity Curriculum Assessment

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3545945.3569762  

   Herman, Geoffrey L. ; Huang, Shan ; Peterson, Peter A. ; Oliva, Linda ; Golaszewski, Enis ; Sherman, Alan T. ( March 2023 , SIGCSE 2023: Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education)

   We present a psychometric evaluation of the Cybersecurity Curriculum Assessment (CCA), completed by 193 students from seven colleges and universities. The CCA builds on our prior work developing and validating a Cybersecurity Concept Inventory (CCI), which measures students' conceptual understanding of cybersecurity after a first course in the area. The CCA deepens the conceptual complexity and technical depth expectations, assessing conceptual knowledge of students who had completed multiple courses in cybersecurity. We review our development of the CCA and present our evaluation of the instrument using Classical Test Theory and Item-Response Theory. The CCA is a difficult assessment, providing reliable measurements of student knowledge and deeper information about high-performing students. 

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5. Creating a Cybersecurity Concept Inventory: A Status Report on the CATS Project

   Sherman, Alan T. ; Oliva, Linda ; DeLatte, David ; Golaszewski, Enis ; Neary, Michael ; Patsourakos, Konstantinos ; Phatak, Dhananjay ; Scheponik, Travis ( June 2017 , National Cyber Summit)

   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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