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What Affects the Success of Programmers in Query Validation Process? An Eye Tracking Study

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Human Interface and the Management of Information (HCII 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14016))

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Abstract

A meticulous examination of SQL queries plays a pivotal role in the process of learning SQL. It is important to understand the procedures utilized by students in SQL query formulation, but there has been insufficient attention given to this direction in recent literature. Therefore, we aim to explore the nature of different approaches of students in understanding SQL questions, along with the given relations to formulate correct SQL queries. We conducted an eye-tracking study with 27 university students to investigate differences in strategies through the difficulty levels of tasks. Overall, we found that differences in the strategies of students have an effect on formulating correct SQL queries. Students who successfully completed the tasks spent more time and had a higher fixation count in all areas of interest, including the question, table, and solution. Moreover, these students took longer in each area of interest to complete the query validation process as the tasks increased in difficulty. The heatmap data revealed that the students who failed the tasks did not follow the same reading order as those who succeeded. The successful students read the SQL from the first line to the last, whereas the unsuccessful students did not adhere to this sequential approach.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Gjøvik, Norway

    Deepti Mishra

  2. Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Lillehammer, Norway

    Deepti Mishra

  3. Department of Design, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Gjøvik, Norway

    Yavuz Inal

Authors
  1. Deepti Mishra
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  2. Yavuz Inal
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Correspondence to Deepti Mishra .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Tokyo City University, Tokyo, Japan

    Hirohiko Mori

  2. Tokyo University of Science, Tokyo, Japan

    Yumi Asahi

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Mishra, D., Inal, Y. (2023). What Affects the Success of Programmers in Query Validation Process? An Eye Tracking Study. In: Mori, H., Asahi, Y. (eds) Human Interface and the Management of Information. HCII 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14016. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35129-7_38

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35129-7_38

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-35128-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-35129-7

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