Analysis of Learning Modalities Towards Effective Undergraduate Cybersecurity Education Design

Cybersecurity education is a critical component of today's computer science and IT curriculum. To provide for a highly effective cybersecurity education, we propose using machine-learning techniques to identify common learning modalities of cybersecurity students in order to optimize how cybersecurity core topics, threats, tools and techniques are taught. We test various hypothesis, e.g. that students of selected VARK learning styles will outperform their peers. The results indicate that for the class assignments in our study preference of read/write and kinesthetic modalities yielded the best results. This further indicates that specific learning instruments can be tailored for students based on their individual VARK learning styles.