Enhancing Interest in Cybersecurity Careers

Janeja, Vandana P.; Faridee, Abu Zaher Md; Gangopadhyay, Aryya; Seaman, Carolyn; Everhart, Amy

doi:10.1145/3159450.3159563

Cited by 4 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…As a result their grades considerably improve which serves to re-validate the findings of peer mentoring in other areas of science, as an effective method of grade improvement. Although in our previous study [12] we were able to compare the results of two semesters of peer mentoring, we only started collecting assignments online from spring 2017 session, so the analysis in this paper is limited to just that semester. We plan to follow up with a detailed comparison with multiple years' result.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We plan to follow up with a detailed comparison with multiple years' result. It would also be interesting to perform a gender-focused analysis (similar to [12]) to investigate whether there is a noticeable difference in the text analysis scores of the male and female students separately between the control and experiment section. Finally, we would like to experiment with more robust supervised and semi-supervised objectivity algorithms for the objectivity classification.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The methodology of the peer mentoring approach is based on our prior work [11], [12], discussing results from a two semester (Spring 2016 and Spring 2017) offering of this intervention. Figure 1 summarizes the study methodology across the two sections (experiment with intervention: IS 300E and control without intervention: IS 300C) of IS 300 and the interactions with peers from IS 471.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, we hope to encourage some of these students into advanced technology careers through peer mentoring and increase participation in this important area of STEM education and cybersecurity careers. We demonstrated in our prior work [11], [12] that students taking introductory courses when engaged in peer mentoring exercises with advanced data analytics in cybersecurity electives expressed more interest in cyber careers. Moreover, peer mentoring was clearly seen to have an impact on the diverse groups, in particular on women.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 90%

“…We wanted to establish the use of peer mentoring in the cybersecurity curriculum [11], [12]. Thus, in our peer mentor-ing approach, we pair the undergraduate students from IS 300: Management of Information Systems gateway course with the students from (IS 471: Data Analytics for Cybersecurity), an advanced cybersecurity course.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Measuring Peer Mentoring Effectiveness in Computing Courses: A Case Study in Data Analytics for Cybersecurity

Faridee

Janeja

2019

2019 26th International Conference on High Performance Computing, Data and Analytics Workshop (HiPCW)

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Computing courses often suffer from lack of diversity. In this paper we evaluate an intervention method of peer mentoring to help increase interest in data analytics in cybersecurity. We present a text mining approach to analyze student assignments while they undergo a peer mentoring exercise. In our prior work, we have shown that the peer mentoring approach is effective at improving the students' interest in cybersecurity careers and contributes to an overall better knowledge gain throughout the semester. This was also reflected by an improvement in grades with two years of anonymous survey results. Across the years we also observed that peer mentoring is particularly effective in diverse groups. In this paper, we perform text mining of the written assignments for analyzing the group behavior of the control and experiment sections of a class while also documenting the effectiveness of intervention methods such as peer mentoring. We employ a few text mining techniques, namely Text Frequency Analysis, Lexical Diversity, Readability Analysis, Hyperlink usage and Objectivity Analysis on the text assignments submitted by the students and show that students who receive peer mentoring are able to express more complex ideas with fewer words and thereby receive higher grades by the end of the semester. Based on these results, we also discuss how our methodology would be applicable in increasing reachability and diversity in other specialized computing courses such as Big Data and distributed systems.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%