Students’ Learning Challenges in Database Courses: A Survey Study in Information Technology Education
Keywords:
Database learning Student challenges ERD SQL tools IT education SurveyAbstract
Database literacy sits at the core of modern IT education, yet how students actually experience the database course, and where they stumble, remains underexplored at the institutional level. This paper reports findings from a survey of 56 undergraduate students enrolled in the database course at the Department of Informatics Engineering, Universitas Negeri Gorontalo, Indonesia, drawn from two study programs: Information Technology Education (PTI, n = 27) and Information Systems (SI, n = 29). An open-ended questionnaire was used; responses were analyzed through qualitative content analysis and coded into thematic clusters. Six categories emerged. Most students (60.7%) navigated the course without major friction, while the remaining 39.3% reported concrete difficulties: Entity Relationship Diagram and normalization confusion stood out at 14.3%, followed by tool and SQL environment issues (8.9%), instructional quality gaps (8.9%), a felt disconnect between theory and hands-on work (5.4%), and hardware access limitations (1.8%). Taken together, the data suggest that while the course works well for the majority, a non-trivial minority needs targeted support, particularly around conceptual modeling and teaching responsiveness.
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