A Web-based Semi-Automatic Assessment Tool for Formulating Basic SQL Statements: Point-and-Click Interaction Method

Learning the Structured Query Language (SQL) is an important step towards developing students' database skills. As such, the number of higher education students learning SQL is constantly increasing. In this context, most researches focus on marking and providing feedback on the final query output rather than on the formulation of the SQL statement clauses. Focusing on statements formulation can assist the examiners in diagnosing the strengths and weaknesses of students' answers and provide detailed feedback on SQL statements that have been submitted for marking. This paper proposes a new semi-automatic assessment tool called SQL Formulation Editor (SQL-FE) for higher levels of education. The tool allows students to formulate SQL statements using point-and-click interaction method. To ensure the effectiveness of the method; the research has conducted an experiment which compares SQL-FE with the SQL Management Studio (SSMS) tool. The results have provided reasonable evidence that using SQL-FE can have a beneficial effect on formulating SQL query on-time and demonstrated a significant improvement in students' performance.