ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Digital Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1554089
Identifying and Addressing Common Undergraduate Database Design Misconceptions
Provisionally accepted
- 1Faculty of Computer and Information, Assiut University, Assiut, Egypt
- 2Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, United States
- 3Department of Computer Science Virginia Tech Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA, Blacksburg, United States
- 4Department of Computer Science and Engineering The State University of New York at Buffalo Buffalo, NY 14260, USA, Bufflo, United States
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Data is a crucial asset for organizations, making it essential for database designers to effectively organize and manage data using DataBase Management Systems (DBMS). DataBase design Concepts (DBCs) are central to computer and information sciences curricula, focusing on teaching students how to conceptually and logically design database systems to manage data through DBMS. Key concepts like conceptual data modeling and mapping models to relational schemas are fundamental to effective database design. However, students often struggle to grasp these concepts despite existing efforts to improve students' learning. Research is limited to identifying and addressing common misconceptions of students related to DBCs. In this paper, our aim is to fill in this research gap by identifying students' difficulties and challenges in comprehending DBCs, exploring their root causes, and proposing a pedagogical intervention to address these challenges early in the learning process. The primary goal is to gain a deeper understanding of how students learn and apply DBCs, formulate a clear list of students' DBCs misconceptions, and finally create an online interactive visual tool aimed at addressing database design learning difficulties and misconceptions through visual presentations.
Keywords: Database education, Database Design Concepts, misconceptions, Visualizations, Entity Relationship Diagram, Relational model, JSAV
Received: 31 Dec 2024; Accepted: 15 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Abdelaziz, Farghally, Mohammed and Soliman. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Noha Abdelaziz, Faculty of Computer and Information, Assiut University, Assiut, Egypt
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