Visible to the public Initial Validation of the Cybersecurity Concept Inventory: Pilot Testing and Expert Review

TitleInitial Validation of the Cybersecurity Concept Inventory: Pilot Testing and Expert Review
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2019
AuthorsOffenberger, Spencer, Herman, Geoffrey L., Peterson, Peter, Sherman, Alan T, Golaszewski, Enis, Scheponik, Travis, Oliva, Linda
Conference Name2019 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)
Date PublishedOct. 2019
PublisherIEEE
ISBN Number978-1-7281-1746-1
Keywordsassessment validation., Cats, Collaboration, composability, computer security, Cybersecurity Assessment Tools (CATS) Project, Cybersecurity Concept Inventory (CCI), cybersecurity education, Education, Human Behavior, Instruments, Interviews, Metrics, Policy-Governed Secure Collaboration, pubcrawl, reliability, resilience, Resiliency, Scalability, science of security, Tools
AbstractWe 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.
URLhttps://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9028652
DOI10.1109/FIE43999.2019.9028652
Citation Keyoffenberger_initial_2019