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1. Psychometric Evaluation of the Cybersecurity Concept Inventorym

   Poulson, S.; Herman, G.; Peterson, P.; Oliva, L.; Golaszewski, E.; Gorti, A.; Scheponik, T.; Sherman, A. T. (January 2021, The ACM transactions on computing education)

   We present a psychometric evaluation of a revised version of the Cybersecurity Concept Inventory (CCI), completed by 354 students from 29 colleges and universities. The CCI is a conceptual test of understanding created to enable research on instruction quality in cybersecurity education. This work extends previous expert review and small-scale pilot testing of the CCI. Results show that the CCI aligns with a curriculum many instructors expect from an introductory cybersecurity course, and that it is a valid and reliable tool for assessing what conceptual cybersecurity knowledge students learned. 

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2. 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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3. Initial validation of the Cybersecurity Concept Inventory: Pilot testing and expert review

   Offenberger, Spencer; Herman, Geoffrey L.; Peterson, Peter; Sherman, Alan T.; Golaszewski, Enis; Scheponik, Travis; Oliva, Linda (October 2019, Proceedings - Frontiers in Education Conference)

   We analyze expert review and student performance data to evaluate the validity of the Cybersecurity Concept Inventory (CCI) for assessing student knowledge of core cybersecurity concepts after a first course on the topic. A panel of 12 experts in cybersecurity reviewed the CCI, and 142 students from six different institutions took the CCI as a pilot test. The panel reviewed each item of the CCI and the overwhelming majority rated every item as measuring appropriate cybersecurity knowledge. We administered the CCI to students taking a first cybersecurity course either online or proctored by the course instructor. We applied classical test theory to evaluate the quality of the CCI. This evaluation showed that the CCI is sufficiently reliable for measuring student knowledge of cybersecurity and that the CCI may be too difficult as a whole. We describe the results of the expert review and the pilot test and provide recommendations for the continued improvement of the CCI. 

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4. Initial Validation of the Cybersecurity Concept Inventory: Pilot Testing and Expert Review

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE43999.2019.9028652  

   Offenberger, Spencer; Herman, Geoffrey L.; Peterson, Peter; Sherman, Alan T; Golaszewski, Enis; Scheponik, Travis; Oliva, Linda (October 2019, Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE))

   We analyze expert review and student performance data to evaluate the validity of the cci for assessing student knowledge of core cybersecurity concepts after a first course on the topic. A panel of 12 experts in cybersecurity reviewed the cci, and 142 students from six different institutions took the cci as a pilot test. The panel reviewed each item of the cci and the overwhelming majority rated every item as measuring appropriate cybersecurity knowledge. We administered the cci to students taking a first cybersecurity course either online or proctored by the course instructor. We applied classical test theory to evaluate the quality of the cci. This evaluation showed that the cci is sufficiently reliable for measuring student knowledge of cybersecurity and that the cci may be too difficult as a whole. We describe the results of the expert review and the pilot test and provide recommendations for the continued improvement of the cci. 

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

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

   null (Ed.)

   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. 

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