# Data-Driven Analysis of Student Engagement in Time-Limited Computer Laboratories
## 3 Experimental Setting  
To analyze students' activities and engagement in SQL education, the present research work relies on real data collected during educational laboratory sessions. The educational context is a computer lab related to a course on database design and management. The course is offered in the context of a B.S. degree in engineering. All the students are enrolled in the same bachelor degree course, have approximately the same background, and carried out the practice under the same conditions. The objective of the laboratory activity is to become familiar with the SQL language through a number of proposed SQL exercises, where the student has to write SQL declarative statements to query a relational database.  
The computer lab is equipped with 43 workstations, but the course has approximately 650 enrolled students; for this reason, students were divided into groups and participated in a 90-min lab session. The task consisted of solving 13 proposed exercises through an educational tool that supported them and recorded all the related events. The first 4 exercises only required knowledge of the basic SQL syntax SELECT... FROM... WHERE.... ORDER BY, the subsequent 4 exercises required a more advanced understanding of SQL grouping operators (GROUP BY... HAVING...), while the remaining ones mainly focused on nesting SQL queries using Table Functions and the IN, EXISTS, NOT IN, NOT EXISTS operators.  
The students' user interface proposed one exercise at a time, with the problem statement, the associated relational database schema, and the table representing the expected correct results. The students entered their tentative query and the Oracle DBMS [45] executed it, providing feedback that was shown to the learners. Besides the DBMS messages  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{p{56.9 pt} p{113.8 pt} p{113.8 pt}} \hline \hline
**Category** & **Key Indicator** & **Definition** & **References** \\ \hline Behavioral & Persistence & The quality or state of maintaining a course of action or keeping at a task and finishing it despite the obstacles or the effort involved. & [6; 33; 34; 35; 36; 37; 38; 39] \\ \hline \multirow{5}{*}{Cognitive} & Concentration & The act of focusing, such as, for example, bringing one’s thought processes to bear on a central problem or subject. & [6; 38; 39; 40] \\ \cline{2-4}  & Reflection & A form of theoretical activity directed toward the comprehension of its own acts and the laws by which they are performed. Reflection includes building conclusions, generalizations, analogies, comparisons, and evaluations, and also emotional experience and remembering and solving problems. It also includes addressing beliefs for interpretation, analysis, realization of acts, discussion, or evaluation. & [6; 35; 37; 38; 41; 42] \\ \cline{2-4}  & Understanding & Building complex understanding and meaning rather than focusing on the learning of superficial knowledge. & [6; 35; 37; 38; 40; 41; 43] \\ \cline{2-4}  & Autonomy & A state of independence and self-determination in an individual, a group, or a society. & [6; 33; 38; 39; 43; 44] \\ \hline Affective & Confidence & A belief that one is capable of successfully meeting the demands of a task. & [33; 35; 40; 42; 44] \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 1: Key engagement indicators analyzed in the present paper.  
(useful for understanding query errors), when the query was syntactically correct, the environment compared the executed result with the expected result, thus highlighting possible semantic errors.  
Through the user interface, students could also ask for the teaching assistant's intervention; the environment recorded both help requests and interventions.  
Participation to labs was optional (even though highly encouraged). Therefore, not every student participated to the lab experiment. For this study, we collected data regarding 215 students, considering only those who accessed at least one exercise.