Tendencies in Database Learning for Undergraduate Students: Learning

In-Depth or Getting the Work Done?

Emilia-Loredana Pop

and Manuela-Andreea Petrescu

Department of Computer Science, Babes Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Keywords:

Database, SQL, Computer Science, Student, Expectation, Challenge, Career Path, Basic Knowledge, Learning

In-Depth, Getting The Work Done.

Abstract:

This study explores and analyzes the learning tendencies of second-year students enrolled in different lines of

study related to the Databases course. There were 79 answers collected from 191 enrolled students that were

analyzed and interpreted using thematic analysis. The participants in the study provided two sets of answers,

anonymously collected (at the beginning and at the end of the course), thus allowing us to have clear data

regarding their interests and to ﬁnd out their tendencies. We looked into their expectations and if they were

met; we concluded that the students want to learn only database basics. Their main challenges were related

to the course homework. We combined the information and the answers related to 1) other database-related

topics that they would like to learn, 2) how they plan to use the acquired information, and 3) overall interest

in learning other database-related topics. The conclusion was that students prefer learning only the basic

information that could help them achieve their goals: creating an application or using it at work. For these

students, ”Getting the work done” is preferred to ”Learning in-depth”.

1 INTRODUCTION

Databases have become very important over the last

decade, with an increasing impact on human’s life, in

almost all all ﬁelds of activities. Databases (DB, for

short) mean various manners to save, access, modify

and process data information, in or without combina-

tion with different applications/software, for the com-

panies, public and private sectors of activity, educa-

tion, students/people career path and personal life.

In education, even if it is about prestigious uni-

versities, or the other ones (like, Anadolu Univer-

sity from Turkey (Kamis¸li, 2004), Ghana (Kwami

Takramah and Atiwoto, 2015), the Databases have a

signiﬁcant place in student management and in the

knowledge process. The online databases allow ac-

cess to documentation for work (see, for example,

(Kumar and Singh, 2021)), open usage of the online

learning journals and many other useful information,

available in real-time.

The high impact of Databases in our activities re-

quires a specialized and dedicated human factor, such

that this subject connected to SQL / NoSQL became

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4737-4080

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9537-1466

mandatory for the students of Mathematical and Com-

puter Science, Technical and Engineering specializa-

tions. Due to (Kahraman, 2022; Spieler et al., 2020),

the student’s socioeconomic status, their motivation,

performance and self-efﬁcacy, the task value beliefs

and the engagement in Computer Science, are also

important aspects that inﬂuence the knowledge and

involvement to obtain performance in Databases.

Nowadays, in the labour market, due to the high

number of students enrolled in Computer Science

specializations, start seeing changes related to how

the learning with passion and involvement was trans-

formed in search on the Internet or just want to cre-

ate the application. The modiﬁcations became more

and more visible, like, the learning in-depth trend

was transformed in get the work done trend. Be-

cause Databases are of actual interest, our research,

which involves it, could be addressed to the entire

community, giving different perspectives and alterna-

tives from the student’s points of view, our new gen-

eration, that will lead us to the future, being the new

employees and employers.

Our analysis related to Databases involves the stu-

dents enrolled in the second year in different spe-

cializations and lines of study. Our faculty, Faculty

of Mathematics and Computer Science, from Babes¸-

750

Pop, E. and Petrescu, M.

Tendencies in Database Learning for Undergraduate Students: Learning In-Depth or Getting the Work Done?.

DOI: 10.5220/0012008100003464

In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE 2023), pages 750-757

ISBN: 978-989-758-647-7; ISSN: 2184-4895

 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, is directly

connected to the IT domain of activity and it is spe-

cialized in learning the students, the basics of IT, like

programming languages and Databases. We have ap-

plied a survey to our Databases course, in which the

participation was optional and anonymous (we only

asked them to choose their specialization and their

gender), to increase the freedom of the student’s re-

sponses. The scope of the paper is to present the

student’s expectancy related to Databases and SQL-

related domains and how could be correlated with the

requests from the labour market. We analyzed their

interests and knowledge about Databases/SQL at the

beginning of the course (some of them, had previous

experience, but others did not know the notions) and

also at the end of it (we performed a ﬁnal survey in

the last week of the course). Then, we also wanted to

ﬁnd out if the students prefer a dedicated career path

in Databases/SQL, database security, or efﬁciency, or

they just want to make use of it seldom. In order to ob-

tain the desired answers, we have asked the students

to complete the following open questions: R1: Do

you have other DB-related topics that you would like

to learn about, besides the ones from the Databases

course?; R2. Did your expectations related to the

Databases course been covered? How do you plan to

use the learned information?; R3. Are you interested

in learning other Database-related topics, or working

in DB-related ﬁelds (as Database Administrator, SQL

Data Analyst, or Database Developer)?.

The paper has the following structure: it starts

with an Introduction and a Literature Review, in

which are presented articles and papers on the same

topic subject, followed by the Methodology section,

the Threats to Validity section, that include the pos-

sible threads of validity and the actions performed in

order to minimize and mitigate them, and it ends with

the Conclusion and Future Work section, in which is

summarized the work with the obtained results and

also are mentioned some future approaches. The most

important section, Methodology, presents the meth-

ods used for this survey to obtain the results, start-

ing with the participant’s set, course curricula, asked

questions, and continuing with the data analysis of the

received responses, and then, for each of the research

questions, were provided relevant conclusions, like,

the student’s expectations in the Databases course

proved to be satisﬁed and their achieved knowledge

being focused only on the basics (for most of the

students), homework proved to be one of the chal-

lenges (for most of the students), a career path of

Databases/SQL seemed to be uninteresting, and the

most important aspect, learning concepts in-depth

trend transformed in get the work done trend.

2 LITERATURE REVIEW

During the last decades, Databases came closer to

people’s careers, by bringing the possibility of storing

and accessing, in different perspectives and alterna-

tives, big amounts of data easier, more efﬁciently, and

in an useful manner. Connected with the Computer

Science ﬁeld of activity, Databases are represented in

the industry with career positions like: Database Ad-

ministrator, Database Migration Operator, Relational

/ Non-Relational / SQL / NoSQL Database Developer,

Database Manager / Architect / Engineer, Data Op-

erator, Data Scientist / Data Analyst, Business An-

alysts / Business Intelligence Developer, and many

other more (see, for example, (Jaiswal, 2022)).

In the process of choosing the desired career path

a very important aspect has to be given to efﬁciency

and also should be taken into account the comparisons

between the genders involved (Mann et al., 2020). For

the students from the Technical University of Iasi, Ro-

mania, have been identiﬁed their career aspirations,

as: lifelong learning, desire of continuing their stud-

ies after ﬁnishing the actual ones, and participation

in different training courses (Anghel, 2015). For the

undergraduate IT students of an Australian university,

were analyzed the career aspirations, by using an on-

line self-assessment of study and career conﬁdence

referring the discipline and of a survey about short-

term and longer-term career aspirations and prior ex-

perience (Mckenzie and Bennett, 2022), revealing the

best motivation as being the intrinsic interest and en-

joyment of IT, without considering the time involved

in such a position. Another analysis, based on ques-

tions and involving a variety of disciplines, was per-

formed, in Australia, for the students (undergraduate,

postgraduate) of a representative university, and con-

cluded that, before graduation students proved to be

uncertain about their careers, but after graduation, the

career path became clear and quite easy to be identi-

ﬁed (Kinash et al., 2017).

For the Databases ﬁeld of activity could be iden-

tiﬁed studies that contain relevant aspects and argu-

ments, some of them obtained from applied surveys

to the students, professors, and various members of

the institutions involved (Dehghani et al., 2018; Uzun

et al., 2020). The educational methods and their lim-

itations were analyzed, for postsecondary education,

in a survey of the published articles from 2015, a pro-

cess performed by the United States’ National Center

for Education Statistics (Mendoza et al., 2017). Hy-

brid learning (online and onsite) was proved to be the

optimum learning method for sixty-two college stu-

dents in the U.S., after an online survey was applied,

one year after the outbreak of COVID-19 (Zhou and

Tendencies in Database Learning for Undergraduate Students: Learning In-Depth or Getting the Work Done?

751

Zhang, 2021). Databases proved to generate a high

degree of satisfaction in the activities performed by

the students and by the faculty members and also in

their lives, at the Shahid Beheshti University, where

a survey with a descriptive approach (questionnaire

and log ﬁles) was proposed (Dehghani et al., 2018).

At the Department of Computer Education and In-

structional Technology, Faculty of Education, Uludag

University, Turkey, was applied a semi-structured in-

terview in which participated 25 students from the

second year, having as ﬁnal result the analysis of the

problem-based learning method applied to the course

Database Management Systems, that revealed the im-

portance of a basic level of knowledge in the imple-

mentation of the problem-based method for designing

the classroom environment (Uzun et al., 2020).

Connected to the Databases ﬁeld of activity, in

Computer Science and Software Engineering, Struc-

tured Query Language (SQL) skills are manda-

tory. SQL represents the most important element of

Databases that provide relevant data information for

a potential user of any database and also it is used

in education, being the basic language of Databases.

Besides the knowledge of SQL, in education is also

required pedagogical skills. Some teaching practices

in SQL education and also a systematic map of edu-

cational SQL research with a future research agenda

are presented in (Taipalus and Sepp

anen, 2020), with

recommendations for the educational SQL research

to include studies on advanced SQL concepts and on

aspects not related to data retrieval and also replica-

tion studies. For some people, Databases mean SQL,

NoSQL, and Big Data, but for others can mean job

positions, like, Data Analyst, Data Science, and Busi-

ness Intelligence. What’s for sure, is the fact that

Databases store big amounts of data information in

simple or complex and different ways and assure ac-

cess to them. Both SQL and NoSQL Databases are

in search nowadays to complete the business trends

and patterns, and near to them are the Data Ware-

houses used for the technological skills and strategi-

cal and statistical competencies. An analysis related

to the presentation of the coordinates used in pro-

cessing data and implications for the academic cur-

ricula that also provide arguments for Data Analyst

and Business Intelligence job positions in the idea of

acquiring a corresponding level of SQL and of Data

Warehouses knowledge is presented in (Fotache and

Strimbei, 2015). To learn Databases, SQL / NoSQL

is easy, because everywhere the information is avail-

able: online training, documents/courses (for exam-

ple, (Halvorsen, 2017; IBM, 2010)), articles, videos,

and their presentations contain and present in various

manners the basic and complex notions involved.

Table 1: Fundamentals of Databases syllabus.

Lecture 1. Introduction to DBs. Fundamental Concepts.

Lecture 2. The Relational Model.

Lecture 3. SQL Queries.

Lecture 4. Functional Dependencies.

Lecture 5. Normal Forms.

Lecture 6. Relational Algebra.

Lecture 7. The Physical Structure of DBs.

Lecture 8. Indexes.

Lecture 9. Binary trees. ISAM. 2-3 trees. B-tree. B+

tree.

Lecture 10. Object Oriented Databases.

Lecture 11. Query Optimization in Relational

Databases. Evaluating Relational Algebra Operators.

Lecture 12. Transactions. Concurrency Control.

Lecture 13. Conceptual Modeling. Data Streams.

Lecture 14. Short review: Relational DBs. Appendixes.

3 METHODOLOGY

How: According to ACM Sigsoft Empirical Stan-

dards for Software Engineering Research (Ralph,

2021), our method is classiﬁed as survey research.

We used surveys that contained open and closed ques-

tions, closed questions were used to assure partic-

ipant representations related to the study line or to

measure their intentions and the open questions were

used to obtain relevant and in-depth information. The

students were asked to answer closed questions that

could allow us to measure their intentions, for exam-

ple To which extend do you plan to use the acquired

knowledge? having a scale from 1 to 5 (Deﬁnitely

NOT Use to Deﬁnitely Use), but also open questions:

How do you plan to use the acquired knowledge? to

have a better understanding of their intentions. We

wanted to see how students’ perception changes over

time, so we had two surveys, at the beginning and dur-

ing the last week of the course. We were interested

in the student’s challenges related to the course, how

their perception of following a career in database-

related ﬁelds after taking the course evolved, and to

what extent they plan to use the acquired knowledge.

To ﬁnd out we asked the students enrolled in the

Databases course from different lines of study (Com-

puter Science - English, Computer Science - native

language, and Mathematics and Computer Science -

native language); as the course syllabus was identical

for all the lines of study. The course topics (or, course

syllabus) are the ones given in Table 1.

Research Ethics: The survey was optional and

anonymous, and the students were informed about

these aspects and also about the purpose of collecting

and using the information they provided (there were

no other purposes than the mentioned ones). We had

79 answers from 191 students enrolled in the course.

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752

3.1 Participants

Being an optional survey, only 79 students from 191

enrolled students participated in the survey and pro-

vided answers, 42% of all the students. The partic-

ipants were students enrolled in the ﬁrst semester of

the second year of study. The survey was open for two

weeks every time, thus allowing students to submit

their responses, after two weeks we closed the survey,

as we considered that the students who did not an-

swer, probably don’t want to participate in the study,

so no other answers will be collected. We considered

that in terms of percentage and numbers, the num-

ber of answers is comparable with the number of an-

swers from other studies from the Computer Science

domain (Marwan et al., 2020; Motogna et al., 2021;

Petrescu and Sterca, 2022), thus making this study a

valid one from this point of view.

3.2 Data Collection and Analysis

The responses were collected using Google forms,

we send the survey link to the students, who com-

pleted it, at their own pace (even if completing the

survey took approximately 5 minutes). We saw an

advantage in the short answers provided by the stu-

dents, sometimes the answers contained typing mis-

takes because we considered their answers to be gen-

uine, without too much thinking and analyzing, thus

providing more accurate data. The answers were col-

lected anonymously, and most of them were submit-

ted on the same day when they were asked to par-

ticipate in the study. We used quantitative methods

(questionnaire survey according to ACM community

standards speciﬁcations (Ralph, 2021)) to obtain the

data and for interpreting the text we used thematic

analysis (Braun et al., 2019). Other Computer Sci-

ence related studies used the questionnaire survey

method (Redmond et al., 2013; Petrescu et al., 2022)

and thematic analysis (Kiger and Varpio, 2020; Mo-

togna et al., 2021). According to the methods men-

tioned, we organized this study in two steps: the ﬁrst

one was to obtain the data (taking into consideration

research ethics) and the second step was to analyze it:

• 1. Analyzed the answers and restructured them if

necessary. Sometimes parts of the answers/whole

answers were more appropriate as answers to

other questions.

• 2. Found speciﬁc keywords and grouped them

into classes (tasks performed by one author).

• 3. The classiﬁcation was analyzed by the other

author, and both authors discussed if changes are

needed.

Table 2: Fundamentals of Databases syllabus.

Qg1. Line of study (choice of Computer Science /

Mathematics and Computer Science

Qg2. Gender (Choice of Male / Female / I don’t want

to answer)

Quiz 1 questions:

Q1. What are your expectations related to the Database

course?

Q2. Do you have DB-related knowledge? Do you know

what is an SQL statement?

Q3. How do you plan to use the learned information?

Are you interested to work in DB-related ﬁelds (for ex-

ample as Database Administrator, SQL Data Analyst,

or Database Developer)?

Quiz 2 questions:

F3. How did the Databases course meet your expecta-

tions? (closed answers using a ﬁve points scale from:

under expectations to exceeded expectations)

F4. What challenges did you encounter during the

Databases course?

F5. What other topics related to Databases are you in-

terested in (and were not studied in the course)?

F6. How do you plan to use the Databases course

knowledge?

F7. Do you see yourself working in the Databases (as

the main ﬁeld of activity)?

Some answers were short (with just one or two

words), others were more descriptive, and we iden-

tiﬁed more than one or two keywords in a speciﬁc

answer. Due to this aspect, the total number of spe-

ciﬁc keywords mentioned is greater than the number

of students participating in the study. We asked the

same closed questions in both surveys, to aggregate

the groups (Qg1, Qg2), but the open questions were

different, as we wanted to analyze how student’s per-

ceptions changed, what were the major course chal-

lenges and how they envision themselves as working

with knowledge acquired in this course (see, Table 2).

3.3 Q1: What Were Your Expectations

Related to the Databases Course

and Were the Expectations Met?

The Databases course was an introductory one, so ba-

sic notions were introduced. The course was deliv-

ered with the assumption that students did not work

or learn Database notions, but the reality was a lit-

tle bit different as there were students that previously

worked with SQL and databases: ”I had an internship

as a software engineer where I worked with SQL”, ”I

currently use some of the principles at work”. How-

ever, most of the students did not work with database

and/or SQL queries”My database knowledge is prac-

tically nonexistent”, or ”I have NoSQL or Database

Tendencies in Database Learning for Undergraduate Students: Learning In-Depth or Getting the Work Done?

753

knowledge”. Due to this aspect, 84% of them stated

that they want to learn databases basics. Analyzing

the answers, we found out that students don’t want

to learn in-depth, to learn about complexity, security,

or efﬁciency, their expectations are related to acquir-

ing knowledge that would allow them to use SQL

and databases. Only 31% mentioned that they would

like to learn about database administration, as most of

them wanted to learn SQL: 58% and 84% basic con-

cepts. At the end of the course, we wanted to ﬁnd

out if their expectations were met, the question was a

closed one, allowing us to measure their perception;

the results can be seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Course Expectations.

In conclusion, students’ expectations were related

mainly to achieving basic knowledge in the database-

related ﬁeld, and SQL instructions; The course meet

their expectations.

3.4 Q2: What Were the Course’s Main

Challenges?

At the end of the course, we wanted to ﬁnd out what

challenges were encountered by the students, taking

into consideration that the course involved lectures,

seminars, laboratory work, and homework. Each

homework assignment was graded and the average

grade was a part of the ﬁnal course grade, so the

students had an interest in solving their homework

correctly and on time. By analyzing their answers,

we found out that their challenges can be aggregated

into four main groups related to course organization -

15.79%, course content - 21.05%, course applicabil-

ity /homework - 42.11%, and some students reported

that they did not encounter any challenges - 10.53%.

The results can be seen in Figure 2.

The students mentioned organizational issues:

”the seminars are not posted on time, before the lab.

We need the information during the lab, so it would

be nice to have access to it before the lab.”, ”there

are a lot of communication channels: team chan-

Figure 2: Course Challenges.

nels and the site”. In terms of course content, the

major complaints were related to triggers and proce-

dures, or even to deﬁnitions: ”triggers were not easy

to understand” and ”procedures were a headache to

go through and understand, but other than that the

course support materials were really helpful and de-

scriptive”, ”The deﬁnitions which were with greek

letters, those were very complicated to understand”.

The major challenges reported were related to home-

work, some students mentioned the text was not as

clear as expected: ”Some homework text was a bit

obscure” or the task was not trivial: ”some parts of

the homework were somehow difﬁcult”, ”Slight difﬁ-

culty with some of the subpoints from the last lab”.

In conclusion, most of the students encountered chal-

lenges related to homework, and some of the obser-

vations can be implemented (such as deﬁning more

clear assignments). As for the homework difﬁculty,

we consider that it’s beneﬁcial for a student to have

”slightly” difﬁcult homework as solving the problems

is a step in acquiring knowledge.

3.5 Getting the Work Done or Learning

Concepts In-Depth?

To ﬁnd out the answer to this inquiry, we asked two

questions and correlated the answers: ”What other

topics related to Databases are you interested in (and

were not studied in the course)?” and ”How do you

plan to use the Databases course knowledge?”. The

students understood the importance of being able to

work with databases: ”things that could help me in

the future”, ”to create a database having a good table

structure” or ”I’ll need this information when I will

develop my applications/sites”, even if some aimed

to learn only the most basic information: ”SQL state-

ments are not important as I can ﬁnd them on inter-

net. We should know only that they exist, how are

ENASE 2023 - 18th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering

754

called and used for, and then we could search for

them on the internet”. To the question ”How do

you plan to use the Databases course knowledge?”,

we group their answers into ﬁve categories: ”Def-

initely NOT use database knowledge”, ”Probably

NOT use”, ”Maybe”, ”Probably use” and ”Deﬁnitely

NOT use”. The percentages can be seen in Figure 3:

Figure 3: Use Intentions.

Some students stated that they don’t know how

or when will they use database-related knowledge ”I

don’t know”, some stated that they plan to use them

”only tangential when I have to”, ”when I have to

develop an application”, and most of the students

that mentioned how will they use it was for ”personal

projects” and ”at work”. A few answers stated that

”I already use them a lot at work”. The low inter-

est in learning in-depth is correlated to their low in-

terest in following a career path in database-related

ﬁelds. However, in total, the percentage of students

that would not choose to work in a DB-related ﬁeld

was 25% in the ﬁrst quiz compared to 31.58% in the

second quiz (end of course). The percentage of stu-

dents that want to work in a database-related ﬁeld in-

creased from 17.43% in the beginning to 26,32%. The

number of students that did not decide increased from

28.5% at the beginning of the course to 42.11% at the

end of the course, probably the group of students that

planned to decide at the end of the course, did not

take any decision. The percentages and evolution are

reﬂected in Figure 4.

Figure 4: DB Related Work Interest.

Based on these values, we can assume that stu-

dents are not interested to follow a career in DB-

related ﬁelds, and consequently, they do not want to

learn in-depth database mechanisms. To the question

”What other topics related to Databases are you in-

terested in (and were not studied in the course)?”, we

group their answers into seven categories: ”Practical

Examples”, ”NoSQL”, ”Deployment”, ”Efﬁciency”,

”Security”, ”Request Based”, ”Nothing”. Some an-

swers contained more than a keyword, so the sum-

marised keywords’ percentage appearance is greater

than 100%. The percentages can be seen in Figure 5:

Figure 5: Knowledge Interest.

Students’ answers come in all lengths, from the

shortest ones: ”NoSQL”, ”Cloud Database” to a

maximum of 183 words, but the average answer was

about 16 words. Some stated that no other informa-

tion should have been taught in the course ”Nothing,

it was perfect.” to a demand for getting the work done

”to create a database as simple and fast as possible”,

”database deployment”, to a pledge for other topics

”we should quit Microsoft SQL and learn something

that can work on multiple platforms, maybe some

non-relational stuff”. However, a large part of the

students (36,84%) mentioned they wanted more prac-

tical examples, asking for a solution to a particular

situation: ”We should do more practical examples

related to BLOB types and how are they used in a

database” or ”I was expecting to connect a database

to a known language (Java for example)”. As a con-

clusion for the last question, the students were not that

interested in learning new concepts (the students’ per-

centage that mentions new technologies and concepts

is signiﬁcantly lower compared to the percentage of

students that wanted to get ”the work done”). We con-

sidered that ”get work done” includes the request for

practical examples (31.82%), the request for deploy-

ment (22.37%), and request-based percentage (based

on the needs of the current project 15.91%). The

mentioned aspects appear as keywords in 70.45% of

the answers compared to the summarized percentage

for ”No SQL”, ”Security” and ” Efﬁciency” which

Tendencies in Database Learning for Undergraduate Students: Learning In-Depth or Getting the Work Done?

755

is 34.09%. We analyzed the results and we took into

consideration the following major arguments related

to the database introductory course:

Argument A. Students Are Interested in Learning

only the Basics. A large majority of students 84%

mentioned that they want to learn and know the ba-

sics, but the interest in learning (complexity, security,

etc.) was minimal, given by 13,46% of the students.

Argument B. Students’ Challenges Regarding

Were Mainly Related to Homework/Practical

Part. The information presented at the course rep-

resented a challenge only for a small part of them, no

one mentioned reading or having challenges with im-

plementing more than was requested by the teacher.

The students were interested to do their homework but

at the bare minimum.

Argument C. Students Want to Learn Only ”what

is needed to create my app”. We analyzed the an-

swers received regarding how they plan to use the

information, most of them stated practical examples

and wanted to know just enough to create and work

with a database in an application, or when needed ”at

work”. They just want ”to get the work done”.

Argument D. What Do They Want to Learn Next?

The students’ percentage satisﬁed with the acquired

information level is doubled compared to the percent-

age of students who want to learn advanced features/

other topics related to databases. In conclusion, a

large part of them in not interested in learning more

database-related topics.

Based on the previous arguments, we concluded

that most of the students prefer to ”get the work done”

without learning or making too much effort in acquir-

ing new knowledge and skills, as they expect to learn

”without stress” because ”we can search for informa-

tion on Google”. Learning in-depth or Getting the

work done? For these students, the answer is ”Get-

ting the work done”.

4 THREATS TO VALIDITY

We focused on mitigating the threats to validity as

they were deﬁned in (Ralph, 2021) and we analyzed

the following topics: target participant set, partic-

ipants selection, contingency actions for drop-outs,

and also research ethics. The target participant of our

survey was represented by a set of students, from the

second year, enrolled in the Databases courses, on the

specializations Computer Science and Mathematics

and Computer Science, in the Romanian and English

lines of study. The students that participated were or-

ganized in groups of study, alphabetically ordered by

their surname. The groups were randomly selected, so

each participant could be part of the survey, without

any other selection criteria. Because of the random

selection of the student groups, no other threats of the

participant set and participant selection were need it.

As the involvement of the students in the survey was

optional, the methods used by us were limited to en-

large the number of participants. Our best option was

to explain clearly and deeply the survey purpose and

its ﬁnal results, which could signiﬁcantly increase the

quality of our activities in Databases (27 versus 52 re-

sponses). As for research ethics, the students knew

the purpose of the survey and also that their participa-

tion was optional (shown by the response rate). More-

over, the students were able to choose the questions

from the survey that they wanted to answer. Another

threat taken into consideration refers to our approach

to processing the data, that we tried to make it less

subjective, by following the recommendation for the

data processing and also by checking others’ work.

5 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE

WORK

For the second-year students, enrolled in Computer

Science and Mathematics and Computer Science

specializations, we wanted to analyze their percep-

tion related to Databases, their importance, and how

attractive could be a job position in a database-related

domain. A survey was applied, to all the 191 students

that participated in the course. We required informa-

tion related to their expectations, knowledge level,

and interest in working in a database-related ﬁeld of

activity, at the beginning of the course and also at the

end of it. The survey was optional and anonymous

and all the students were encouraged to participate

in it. The analysis of the responses was performed

as the community standards recommended, and all

the possible threats to validity were handled, by

having a diverse set of participants (given only by

specialization and gender). We concluded that most

of the students are interested in a basic level of

Database knowledge and they preferred to focus only

on the SQL knowledge part. The challenges met

during the semester, proved to be, for most of them,

related to the homework. Most of the students, that

were undecided if they want or not a job related to

Databases/SQL (DB administrator, SQL developer,

and so on), in the beginning of the course, concluded

that are not interested in a database career path, in the

end of the course. They just want to consider the job

positions available in the labour market, even if are

or are not connected to the database-related domain.

They also consider the knowledge of Database basics

ENASE 2023 - 18th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering

756

as being enough for their career path. Our main

conclusion, of this survey, was identiﬁed, as being,

the replacement of the learning in-depth concept with

the get the work done concept, a principle applied

by the students during the semester. In the future,

we want to ﬁnd out if the same trends and aspects

could be found in other courses, too, to provide

comparisons related to the gender of the students

involved and also to analyze a long-time perception.

FUNDING The publication of this article was

supported by the 2022 Development Fund of the

Babes¸-Bolyai University.

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