Teaching Entity-Relationship Models Effectively

Entity-Relationship (ER) models are usually used to design a database application in the industry. Therefore, ER models are taught in database courses at many schools offering tertiary education. However, teaching ER modeling effectively is a challenge for the instructors. The research presented in this paper is based on our previous work that had identified frequent modeling errors. This paper identifies the root cause of many of those errors. It further studies the impact of these errors on the database design. The results presented establish the importance of making right assumptions - an aspect usually ignored while teaching ER models. It is expected that the instructors can take advantage of the findings of this research to improve students learning.