Experiences and Lessons Learned Creating and Validating Concept Inventories for Cybersecurity
This work addresses the problem of assessing cybersecurity education for instructors and students, but it is incremental as it builds on existing concept inventory methods applied to a new domain.
The researchers tackled the challenge of creating and validating two concept inventories for cybersecurity education (CCI for introductory courses and CCA for advanced programs), each with 25 multiple-choice questions targeting five core concepts, to measure teaching effectiveness. They documented key steps like defining scope, identifying misconceptions, and developing questions, noting that constructing effective questions is difficult due to cybersecurity's subtle and adversarial nature.
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.