## 4 Research Design
### Methodology  
In order to test the hypothesis that employing storytelling may assist in the progress of learning over expository text, even when the subject is eminently technical and with adult students, we set the following research questions:  
**RQ1:**: What is the resulting student attitude towards this format, in respect to a traditional one (i.e., expository text)? **RQ2:**: What is its influence in the students' self-perception of their knowledge acquisition? **RQ3:**: What is the real impact on the student's knowledge acquisition? To address these research questions, the CompSec course was divided into two different virtual classes. The novelette was deployed in one of them (in the following, we will refer to this group as _Narrative group_ or Ng), whereas the standard curriculum format was used in the other (which will be referred as _Expository group_ or Eg). Following the recommendations by the ethics committee of the university, students in each group had the option to voluntarily participate in this study. Participation consisted basically of answering two questionnaires. To encourage participation, students that answered the two questionnaires were awarded with 1 extra point out of 10 in the first graded assignment of the course. The Eg group included 63 subjects, out of which 49 participated in the study. The Ng included 71 subjects, out of which 62 participated in the study. Figure 3 shows the main demographic variables of the participants in the study for both groups. The two questionnaires were designed by two instructors to gather quantitative and qualitative data to mainly evaluate the students' perception of the learning resources format and content, and their perception on the acquired knowledge. The questionnaires and the grades of the first assignment were also used to assess the actual knowledge acquisition. This approach is aligned with [44], which served as a basis to the methodological design of this study. Table 1 contains a summary of the main variables analyzed in this study using both questionnaires. Variables P1.1 to P1.5 and P2.1 to P2.4 were questions posed directly in the second questionnaire. \"Improvement\" was a variable computed taking the difference on the security knowledge score obtained in both questionnaires. Finally, \"Activity grade\" was the score obtained in the first assignment of the course. The first questionnaire was answered by the participants at the beginning of the course, containing two blocks of questions: a block to obtain student profile information, with questions related to their enrollment in the university and their previous experience in security; and a second block with a pre-test of ten questions to assess security knowledge prior to working on the learning resources under study (e.g., questions about security tools, attacks, vulnerabilities, countermeasures following the conceptual map previously shown in Figure 2). The answers to these questions were used to compute a pre-study security knowledge score. The second questionnaire was answered by the participants after reading the learning resources and working on the first graded assignment of the course, which was self-paced. Figure 3: Demographics of the subjects participating in the study. This questionnaire contained four blocks of questions: the first block with five questions to evaluate the impression of the students about the format of the learning resource under study (questions P1.1 to P1.5 in Table 1); the second block with four questions for the student to self-assess their acquired knowledge (questions P2.1 to P2.4 in Table 1); the third block with ten questions to evaluate the actual knowledge acquired after reading the resources and working on the assignment. These questions were similar to the questions in the second block of the first questionnaire and served to compute a post-study security knowledge score. The \"Improvement\" variable was calculated taking the difference between the post-study and the pre-study scores.