Psychometric Evaluation of the Cybersecurity Concept Inventory

Seth Poulsen
Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Champaign, IL

(Joint work with Geoffrey L. Herman, Alan T. Sherman, Linda Oliva, Peter A. H. Peterson,
Enis Golaszewski, Travis Scheponik, Akshita Gorti.)

12:00noon–1pm
Friday, September 18, 2020
remotely via WebEx: umbc.webex.com/meet/sherman

A recording of the talk can be found here.

Abstract:

We present a psychometric evaluation of a revised version of the Cybersecurity Concept Inventory (CCI) completed by 355 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 cybersecurity conceptual knowledge students learned.

About the Speaker:

Seth Poulsen is a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I’m interested in Computing Education, Programming Language design and implementation, Math Education, and any interesting intersections of the above. Previously, he was a Software Engineer at Amazon.com, working on Kindle Web Rendering and the Kindle Lite Android app.

Email: sethp3@illinois.edu

URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seth-poulsen/

Support for this research was provided in part by the U.S. Department of Defense under CAE-R grants H98230-15-1-0294, H98230-15-1-0273, H98230-17-1-0349, H98230-17-1-0347; and by the National Science Foundation under UMBC SFS grants DGE-1241576, 1753681, and SFS Capacity Grants DGE-1819521, 1820531.
For more on the educational Cybersecurity Assessment Tools (CATS) Project: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.05248.pdf

Host:

Alan T. Sherman: sherman@umbc.edu

Support for this event was provided in part by the National Science Foundation under SFS grant DGE-1753681.