Sherman et al. win best paper for cybersecurity education

CSEE Professor Alan Sherman and his colleagues received the Best Paper award in the Computing Education Research Track  at the 2023 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium. The symposium is the main ACM conference for computer science educators and has been held annually since 1970.

The paper, Psychometric Evaluation of the Cybersecurity Curriculum Assessment, was based on joint research with collaborators at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Minnesota, Duluth.  It describes the Cybersecurity Curriculum Assessment (CCA) tool used to evaluate students' cybersecurity knowledge after they have completed a multi-course curriculum.

Psychometric Evaluation of the Cybersecurity Curriculum Assessment, Geoffrey L. Herman, Shan Huang, Peter A. Peterson, Linda Oliva, Enis Golaszewski, Alan T. Sherman, in Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 2023.

The paper provides a detailed evaluation of how 193 students answered 25 questions based on different scenarios and identified which questions were better at recognizing the students who understood the underlying concepts best and could apply them to real-world situations.

The research builds on early work on a Cybersecurity Concept Inventory, which was used to assess students' conceptual knowledge of cybersecurity following a first course in the subject.