The Curriculum Standards Panel

invites your participation in the

Information Security Fundamentals

Readiness Assessment

The Information Security Fundamentals Readiness Assessment Pilot Program makes available a concept inventory formative assessment that determines readiness to enroll in the National CyberWatch Center Foundation Series Information Security Fundamentals Course (FS-ISF). 

This assessment is designed to identify mastery or diagnose deficiencies in understanding the topics required to demonstrate readiness for an information security fundamentals course. This is a formative assessment. An initial set of recommendations will be provided to the respondent upon completion of the first part of the assessment. A more detailed set of reports, including benchmarking against the peer group, will be provided after analysis of all respondent data has been completed. Additionally, group administrators will receive a report that aggregates the data from all the group’s respondents. The assessment is anonymous but provides for institutional encoding of respondent IDs to permit individual reporting without divulging the identity of the participant to the National CyberWatch Center.

The assessment consists of two parts. Each part would take about 40-50 minutes to complete.  In part one, the respondent will be presented with a two-level multiple choice assessment. This is called a two-level concept inventory because the design includes an assessment of the respondent’s confidence about each concept. The confidence rating provides diagnostic data about the depth of knowledge possessed by the respondent. The second part is a concept mapping assessment. In this assessment, the respondent is asked to consider the similarity of pairs of concepts. The concept pairings are analyzed to develop a concept map of the respondents understanding of the topics. These concept maps are then compared with those of peers and experts to determine gaps or structural differences. Combined with the concept inventory, analysis of the concept map enables a more accurate diagnostic of the readiness state and learning needs of the respondent.

The final report to be sent to the group administrator will provide the benchmarking score analysis against national norms, individual development plans (IDPs) for each respondent, and instruction recommendations for the faculty teaching fundamentals of information security. 

Any faculty member or corporate trainer may register to have their students participate in the Readiness Assessment Pilot. You may elect to discontinue participation in the pilot program at any time. If you register before February 22nd for the spring semester, April 26th for summer sessions, or August 16th for the fall semester, you will be eligible for a pre- and post-test analysis to help you evaluate the effectiveness of your curriculum or training program.

A successful initial pilot ran in Fall 2018. We are excited to offer an expansion of this free program for National CyberWatch Center members in 2019.