Percentage Composition

I wanted to make this lesson a bit more interesting as well as incorporate opportunities for connections with other maths topics.

I knew my year 8 class students loved music so I devised a very simple poll on Rob Thomas (one of the students was going to his concert): like him, don’t like him, don’t know him. This was a good opportunity to revise Frequency Distribution.

Just by fluke, our 3 fractions turned out percentages of recurring decimals (another connection). In that sense, it’s really not a very good first example! Anyway, someone asked if the percentages will total a hundred (I love it when they think!). So, we added and of course it didn’t. We got a result of 99.8%.  This opened up a discussion on the consequences of rounding/truncating decimals.

I made a statement that the most accurate way to represent not whole (fractional) values is via fractions. Nods all around until I asked, “‘Do you believe me?” The consensus was yes because I was the teacher. I was quick to point out that they should not always believe everything teachers say – they have to think if it’s reasonable; teachers are humans, after all, and can make mistakes. Besides, I really wanted to challenge my students to develop their thinking and reasoning.

So, I went back to the Frequency Distribution Table and 3 fractions. Adding the fractions naturally gave a total of 1 and nearly everyone said that’s 100%, as expected. Joy!

Were it a more able class (we stream our Maths classes), I could have pursued more connectionist opportunities but I did sense I’ve pushed enough today. I know I’ll refer back to this lesson when we actually do Data later in the school year. The class was engaged because they knew the meaning behind the numbers.

By the way, the statement is a fact I had truly learned in my previous career in IT. Particularly when I worked for a bank calculating interests, calculations in programs (software rather than curricular) were designed to stick to fractions as much as possible to minimise rounding errors.

In summary (more for my future reference),

Learning strategies: connectionism, motivation and engagement via meaningful and relevant examples, question/reason validity, compare/contrast

Fractions, Decimals and Percentages – provide different ways to represent fractional values, of which fractions are the most accurate

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