Factors Impacting Cybersecurity Students’ Classroom Success with Their Worries Towards Success
Emre Tokgöz, Sergio Duarte, Alyssa Xiang, Julissa Molina, Tanvir Ahmed, Joel Joseph · 2025
A variety of factors that are impacting how well cybersecurity students do in the classroom as well as their worry levels are analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively in this Institutional Review Board (IRB) approved study. The data is collected from 103 students at a university located in the Northeastern side of the United States with the quantitative data analysis applications including statistics, data distribution with model fitting, correlation with heatmap evaluation, cross-correlation, and Mann-Whitney U-test while qualitative analysis is based on video recorded and transcribed undergraduate cybersecurity students’ responses as a follow-up to their answers to the research questions; The qualitative data collected targeted to furthermore understand the participants’ written responses with explanations. Participants are compensated with money for taking place in the video recorded interviews. Combined qualitative and quantitative analysis indicated highest cross correlation between the worry levels of how students do well in the classroom and their desire to have a good job; this may be due to participants’ higher desire to have a good job resulting in higher stress levels and worries on doing well in the classroom. Looking at the qualitative analysis of the data, the correlation between participants who want to solve challenging cybersecurity students appear to believe that they need to do well in the classroom to be well prepared for solving challenging real-world cybersecurity problems.