Different Approaches to Teaching a Database Course to Graduate and Undergraduate Students

Database Design and Implementation is a cornerstone course in any computer science curriculum. Database Design is taught first using an abstract model, followed by a practical implementation using a DBMS. In this poster, we compare the performance of a class of graduate students versus a class of undergraduate students studying the same syllabus. The graduates performed better in the design part and the undergraduates did better in the implementation part. In the subsequent offering of the course, more time was given to the design part for the undergraduate students, and that resulted in an improvement of performance in both the design and implementation parts. We conclude that the younger undergraduate students can benefit from a more design-heavy course, while the older graduate students would need more emphasis on the implantation aspect of the course.