"Herman's Study Furthering Cybersecurity Curriculum Assessment Earns Best Paper Award"
Geoffrey Herman is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, whose most recent work came through a multi-institutional research project that resulted in a Best Paper Award from the 2023 Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, organized by the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE). Herman's paper, "Psychometric Evaluation of the Cybersecurity Curriculum Assessment," built upon collaborative research with the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and the University of Minnesota, Duluth. This paper explores effective cybersecurity teaching and learning among students. According to the paper, the project was inspired by a shortage of cybersecurity professionals, which cannot be addressed without an understanding of which cybersecurity curricula and teaching strategies provide students with a solid foundation. The group first worked on the Cybersecurity Assessment Tools project, which entailed the development of tools that accurately measure how well courses and curricula are forming students' conceptual knowledge. This effort advanced through the group's focus on a Cybersecurity Concept Inventory, which they use to assess students' conceptual knowledge of cybersecurity following a first course in the subject. The newest paper describes the Cybersecurity Curriculum Assessment used to evaluate students' cybersecurity knowledge after they have completed a multi-course curriculum. The main takeaway is that there are tools validated by research to evaluate how well cybersecurity courses and curricula prepare students to think broadly about cybersecurity. This article continues to discuss the "Psychometric Evaluation of the Cybersecurity Curriculum Assessment" paper that won the Best Paper Award from the 2023 Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education.