A Cognitive Apprenticeship Based Approach to Teaching Relational Database Analysis and Design

Educators have a twofold challenge in teaching relational database design concepts: to deliver the theory of relational database and to provide students with practical skills to perform effectively in real life. This paper introduces a pedagogical approach based on Cognitive apprenticeship for teaching an undergraduate relational database course. The goal of utilizing cognitive apprenticeship model is to alleviating the impact of the challenge by making thinking visible. The utilization of the model was carried out by, first, breaking down the database design process into manageable phases, where each phase has defined decision points, deliverables or completion milestones. Then, the pedagogical process proceeds by introducing students to the theoretical foundation of each phase followed by introducing a practical example related to the phase. Students then are divided into in-class groups and assigned small problems to work on in the class. One of the requirements of the course is the delivery of a real life problem that represents students understanding of the course concepts. The students work on these projects in groups, out-class, that have different members than the in-class ones. Results achieved in realistic experiments showed that this approach is practical, straightforward-to-implement, increase student motivation, and achieve higher levels of learning.