ABSTRACT
The computing education community has studied extensively the errors of novice programmers. In contrast, little attention has been given to student's mistake in writing SQL statements. This paper represents the first large scale quantitative analysis of the student's syntactic mistakes in writing different types of SQL queries. Over 160 thousand snapshots of SQL queries were collected from over 2000 students across eight years. We describe the most common types of syntactic errors that students make. We also describe our development of an automatic classifier with an overall accuracy of 0.78 for predicting student performance in writing SQL queries.
- Brusilovsky, P., Sosnovsky, S., Lee, D., Yudelson, M., Zadorozhny, V., and Zhou, X. 2008. An open integrated exploratorium for database courses. ITiCSE '08. pp. 22--26. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Brusilovsky, P., Sosnovsky, S., Yudelson, M. V., Lee, D. H., Zadorozhny, V., and Zhou, X. 2010. Learning SQL programming with interactive tools: From integration to personalization. Trans. Comput. Educ. 9, 4, Article 19 (January 2010). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Mitrovic, A. 1998. Learning SQL with a computerized tutor. SIGCSE '98, pp. 307--311. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Mitrovic, A. 2003. An intelligent SQL tutor on the web. Int. J. Artif. Intell. Ed. 13, 2--4 (April 2003), pp. 173--197. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Prior, J., and Lister, R. 2004. The backwash effect on SQL skills grading. ITiCSE 2004, Leeds, UK. pp. 32--36. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Prior, J. 2014. AsseSQL: an online, browser-based SQL skills assessment tool. ITiCSE 2014. pp. 327--327. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wetly, C. and Stemple, D. 1981. Human factors comparison of a procedural and a nonprocedural query language. ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS) 6;4:626--629 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Reisner, P. 1977. Use of psychological experimentation as an aid to development of a query language. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. SE-3, 3 (1977), 218--229. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wetly, C. 1985. Correcting user errors in SQL. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 22(4): 463--477. Google ScholarCross Ref
- Buitendijk, R. B., 1988. Logical errors in database SQL retrieval queries. Computer Science in Economics and Management 1 (1988) 79--96 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Smelcer, J. B. 1995. User error in database query composition. Int. J. Human-Computer Studies (1995) 42, 353--381 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Brass, S. and Goldberg, C. 2006. Semantic error in SQL queries: A quite complete list. The Journal of Systems and Software 79 (2006) 630--644. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Frank, E. and Witten, I. H. 1998. Generating accurate rule sets without global optimization. (Working paper 98/2). Hamilton, New Zealand: University of Waikato, Department of Computer Science.Google Scholar
- Hall, M., Frank, E., Holmes, G., Pfahringer, B., Reutemann, P. and Witten. I. H. 2009. The WEKA data mining software: an update. ACM SIGKDD explorations newsletter, 11(1):10--18, 2009. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Ahadi, A., Prior, J., Behbood, V. and Lister, R. 2015. A quantitative study of the difficulty for novices of writing seven different types of SQL queries. ITiCSE (2015) Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education 201-206. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Students' Syntactic Mistakes in Writing Seven Different Types of SQL Queries and its Application to Predicting Students' Success
Recommendations
A Quantitative Study of the Relative Difficulty for Novices of Writing Seven Different Types of SQL Queries
ITiCSE '15: Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science EducationThis paper presents a quantitative analysis of data collected by an online testing system for SQL "select" queries. The data was collected from almost one thousand students, over eight years. We examine which types of queries our students found harder ...
Students' Semantic Mistakes in Writing Seven Different Types of SQL Queries
ITiCSE '16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science EducationComputer science researchers have studied extensively the mistakes of novice programmers. In comparison, little attention has been given to studying the mistakes of people who are novices at writing database queries. This paper represents the first ...
Insights from Student Solutions to SQL Homework Problems
ITiCSE '20: Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science EducationWe analyze the submissions of 286 students as they solved Structured Query Language (SQL) homework assignments for an upper-level databases course. Databases and the ability to query them are becoming increasingly essential for not only computer ...
Comments