Teaching relational database fundamentals: a lack-of-progress report

This paper describes and evaluates changes introduced in six successive years teaching a relational databases module. We explain how we plan to obtain some certainty on the value of interventions. Using an archive of data over the period, we find some interventions that should not be repeated. We also show that most changes introduced did not significantly improve students’ learning, contrary to expectations. Instead, factors that were ignored had more influence on performance that factors we attempted to affect.