ARC Project

This project addresses the need for rigorous research on assessment. Partnering with cybersecurity researchers, educators and assessment experts, the team will create and pilot test a bank of cybersecurity assessment items. The items will be aligned to the High School Cybersecurity Curriculum Guidelines for four of the Big Ideas: Ubiquitous Connectivity, Data Security, System Security, and Adversarial Thinking.

The research team will be using Evidence Centered Design to: 1) model how students represent knowledge and develop competence in a subject domain, 2) identify tasks or situations that allow observation of students’ performances, and 3) develop an interpretation model for drawing inferences from performance evidence. The Evidence Centered Design methodology is rigorous, used for a broad range of assessment types, and is particularly relevant when developing innovative assessments of novel, hard-to-measure domains like cybersecurity. Another strength of Evidence Centered Design is its broad applicability through creating design patterns that lead to extensible development of assessment items and scoring rubrics.