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Rather than improve how SQL is taught (which seems to be the paper's objective), why not improve SQL so it isn't as horrible to try to learn in the first place?
The barriers to grokking SQL could be lowered considerably if SQL made minor adjustments like moving the projection part of a SELECT query to being below or syntactically after the WHERE clause instead of being at the top, and making SQL more "natural" to write-in without needing excessively verbose inner-derived-table expressions when all you want is to do perform some repetitive calculation which will be reused in later query steps.
Also, the GROUP BY clause really needs to be renamed to "AGGREGATE BY" or similar, because when normal people think "group" they're probably thinking of sorting/ORDER BY or PARTITION BY and they certainly don't imagine "don't display these rows at all, lol".
I just don't understand what drives the ISO SQL language design committee - I'd have thought that the newer revisions (e.g. SQL-2003) would have improved the language's ergonomics - on the contrary: the language's grammar and verbosity gets worse every release, and the team has strange priorities: apparently they feel needing to generate in-memory XML is more important than deferrable constraints - and I only ever see ISO SQL's XML features being abused to make-up for a lack of decent string-aggregation functions.
(...I could talk for hours about everything wrong with SQL.)