2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Cybersecurity students’ efficacy in learning computer security specific concepts and the educational modalities that they are comfortable with learning such concepts are important aspects of their education. There is very limited investment in pedagogical research of cybersecurity students’ learning based on their interest of learning modalities, pedagogical strategies of learning the associated concepts, and the psychological factors that impact their learning. Majority of the relevant literature research focuses on either hypothetical discussion on how psychological factors impact cybersecurity education from a cybersecurity perspective rather than factors that impact students’ ability to learn relevant concepts in different environments as well as interaction with others or corporate-based cybersecurity behaviors [2,3,4]. Cybersecurity education is expanding throughout the United States, and in the World, with a tremendous growth over the past decade. Hence, understanding and helping students to learn better after determining their best interest in learning environment in this emerging field is necessary to investigate [5]; Therefore, this research is aiming to investigate the cybersecurity students’ best interests in the methods and strategies that help them to learn major-specific concepts. To the best of our knowledge, there is no pedagogical study that aims to understand methods and strategies that would help cybersecurity undergraduate students’ effectiveness in learning during their major-specific learning from a psychological perspective, and their ideal conceptual learning environment (such as in-class online learning, etc.) The coverage of the contents would also include how their psychological well-being is impacted during their learning and educational experiences.
The research is conducted in one of the public universities in the Northeastern region of the United States to obtain the results presented in this work. IRB approval is attained to conduct the research. Qualitative and quantitative data is collected from cybersecurity students; The quantitative data is the numerical data attained from more than 150 students based on the following two research questions:
1. What method or strategy helps you the most during your learning computer security experiences?
2. What is your ideal learning environment for learning computer security courses?

The qualitative data is collected from 20 students with their voice recordings during the interviews. Each student received an incentive to participate in the interview. The interview targeted to learn details of the participant survey responses of the students with additional follow-up questions to understand the details of their written responses to the questions. Statistical calculations form the quantitative results while qualitative results rely on the voice-recorded interviews. This research is currently in progress and a summary of the results will be included in the abstract once it is completed.

References
1. Taylor-Jackson, J., McAlaney, J., Foster, J. L., Bello, A., Maurushat, A., & Dale, J. (2020). Incorporating psychology into cyber security education: a pedagogical approach. In Financial Cryptography and Data Security: FC 2020 International Workshops, AsiaUSEC, CoDeFi, VOTING, and WTSC, Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, February 14, 2020, Revised Selected Papers 24 (pp. 207-217). Springer International Publishing.
2. Anwar, M., He, W., Ash, I., Yuan, X., Li, L., & Xu, L. (2017). Gender difference and employees' cybersecurity behaviors. Computers in Human Behavior, 69, 437-443.
3. AL-Nuaimi, M. N. (2024). Human and contextual factors influencing cyber-security in organizations, and implications for higher education institutions: a systematic review. Global Knowledge, Memory and Communication, 73(1/2), 1-23.
4. Mukherjee, M., Le, N. T., Chow, Y. W., & Susilo, W. (2024). Strategic approaches to cybersecurity learning: A study of educational models and outcomes. Information, 15(2), 117.
5. Crabb, J., Hundhausen, C., & Gebremedhin, A. (2024, March). A Critical Review of Cybersecurity Education in the United States. In Proceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1 (pp. 241-247).