The Big Idea! Developing the Cybersecurity Mindset Using Representational Fluency and Model-Eliciting Activities
Primary Investigator:
Baijian Yang
Dr. Melissa Dark, Dr. Baijian Yang, Dr. Yingjie Chen, Dr. Jenny Daugherty, Joe Beckman
Abstract
Despite relatively high rates of pay and existing professional certification programs, a shortage of IT security professionals exists in the United States. The shortage is most acute of those able to design and build secure systems. Producing professionals with deep technical skills who are facile in abstraction, problem solving, reasoning, and adversarial thinking, which are critical skills needed to perform in the highly complex and emergent domain of cybersecurity is hard. Grounded in cognitive theory, this work develops model-eliciting activities for key network security concepts, investigates students’ representational fluency in those concepts, and investigates the relationship of students’ development of schema and changes in their cognitive processing and control.