Search for: All records

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

We present and analyze results from a pilot study that explores how crowdsourcing can be used in the process of generating distractors (incorrect an-swer choices) in multiple-choice concept inventories (conceptual tests of under-standing). To our knowledge, we are the first to propose and study this approach. Using Amazon Mechanical Turk, we collected approximately 180 open-ended responses to several question stems from the Cybersecurity Concept Inventory of the Cybersecurity Assessment Tools Project and from the Digital Logic Concept Inventory. We generated preliminary distractors by filtering responses, grouping similar responses, selecting the four most frequent groups, and refining a repre-sentative distractor for each of these groups. We analyzed our data in two ways. First, we compared the responses and resulting distractors with those from the aforementioned inventories. Second, we obtained feedback from Amazon Mechanical Turk on the resulting new draft test items (including distractors) from additional subjects. Challenges in using crowdsourcing include controlling the selection of subjects and filtering out re-sponses that do not reflect genuine effort. Despite these challenges, our results suggest that crowdsourcing can be a very useful tool in generating effective dis-tractors (attractive to subjects who do not understand the targeted concept). Our results also suggest that this method is faster, easier, and cheaper than is the tra-ditional method of having one or more experts draft distractors, building on talk-aloud interviews with subjects to uncover their misconceptions. Our results are significant because generating effective distractors is one of the most difficult steps in creating multiple-choice assessments. 

We evaluate the validity of the Cybersecurity Concept Inventory for assessing student knowledge of core cybersecurity concepts after a first course on the topic. 

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. 

We conducted an observational study to document student misconceptions about cybersecurity using thematic analysis of 25 think-aloud interviews. By understanding patterns in student misconceptions, we provide a basis for developing rigorous evidence-based recommendations for improving teaching and assessment methods in cybersecurity and inform future research. This study is the first to explore student cognition and reasoning about cybersecurity. We interviewed students from three diverse institutions. During these interviews, students grappled with security scenarios designed to probe their understanding of cybersecurity, especially adversarial thinking. We analyzed student statements using a structured qualitative method, novice-led paired thematic analysis, to document patterns in student misconceptions and problematic reasoning that transcend institutions, scenarios, or demographics. Themes generated from this analysis describe a taxonomy of misconceptions but not their causes or remedies. Four themes emerged: overgeneralizations, conflated concepts, biases, and incorrect assumptions. Together, these themes reveal that students generally failed to grasp the complexity and subtlety of possible vulnerabilities, threats, risks, and mitigations, suggesting a need for instructional methods that engage students in reasoning about complex scenarios with an adversarial mindset. These findings can guide teachers’ attention during instruction and inform the development of cybersecurity assessment tools that enable cross-institutional assessments that measure the effectiveness of pedagogies.