Teaching Normalization: Experiments and Tips for Enhancing Student Learning Outcomes

DOI: 10.5176/2251-2195_CSEIT12.16

Authors: Junhu Wang

Abstract: Normalization is one of the main techniques in designing good relational database schemas, and it is an area students with weak backgrounds tend to find difficult. In this paper we share with colleagues our experience in teaching normalization in an introductory Database Design course. We first present a heuristic that helps students to quickly find all candidate keys with a given set of functional dependencies, which is a crucial step in normalization. We then present our experiments on the use of four different methods in teaching normalization. We also report our experiments with two approaches in helping students understanding the relationship between BCNF and data redundancy.

Keywords: Database design; normalization; learning outcomes

LinkOut:    Griffith University