Learning Security

Repetition and review are key to retention.

We believe the ability to accommodate repetition and review is one of the reasons for the increased effectiveness described above. For most topics, we found it relatively easy to design tasks that required students to use tools and techniques covered in earlier sessions in completing the hands-on portion of later sessions. One of the tools for which we did not contrive such an opportunity was TrueCrypt. Though our data are a long way from demonstrating causality, we feel that our participants’ relatively low competency with this tool is likely related to the fact that they only had one opportunity to practice using it. As shown at the end of the Curriculum section in Appendix A, of the eight students who attended the TrueCrypt workshop and who were present at the evaluation session, fewer than half were able to fully demonstrate their ability to use the tool’s core features without assistance.