CONCEPT MAPS AS A DEVICE FOR LEARNING DATABASE CONCEPTS

At the university level, a student should not just learn to memorise all the complex information he is taught. Instead, he should aim to learn, what the information means and what the connections between different pieces of information are, i.e., aim in deep learning. In order to do that, the student has to be able to organise the information into structures that are natural and understandable for him. One method for structuring and representing information, so that deep learning is enhanced, is concept maps. Concept maps have been used in many university disciplines, e.g., biology, chemistry, engineering, history, medicine, psychology, social sciences and computer science. They have even been applied in teaching databases. In order to enlighten the suitability of concept maps for teaching database concepts, we describe in this paper how concept maps were used as a learning and assessment tool in a course of distributed databases. The learning results of the course were good, and on the whole, concept maps showed out to be a promising tool for learning of database concepts