Reasoning and Working Proportionally with Percent

Percent, an important topic in the middle school and junior high school curriculum, is commonly found in the everyday lives of students. This topic presents a wonderful opportunity for students to reason and work proportionally with quantities. Teachers have tried different instructional approaches with varying degrees of success, but percent remains a difficult topic for students to understand. Various representations have been used in instruction, such as fractions, decimals, pie charts, and number lines. Although the use of visual models is a step in the right direction, these visual representations are often abandoned as students progress into the topic. Emphasis is then placed on conversions, equations, and computations. However, these representations may not stress the very nature of the concept. Instruction in this important topic should stress what percent really is instead of concentrating on surface features of the numeral and the problems in which it appears.