Understand The Concept Of Percentage And Teaching Research

In today’s mathematics teaching, research that related to concepts such as fractions and decimals can often be saw in education publications, in contrast, it seems no one shows any interest in a similar concept—percent. However, the lack of research doesn’t mean there is no problem. In the teaching practice of percent, students have a high curiosity about the questions such as "Why do we need to learn percent" and "Why percent sign is written as%", but teacher cannot give the all-sided and accurate answers to these questions. Therefore, this study mainly explore what is the nature of percent, what kind of difficulties and confusion that students have during learning percent and what problems exist in teaching and textbooks.In this study, documentary method, questionnaire survey method and case analysis method are used for the analysis of fifth and sixth grade students, in order to understand the current situation of learning percent. The result shows that:First, students’ understanding about percent is a little one-sided and they’re confined to the part and whole comparison; Second, students are vulnerable to existing knowledge and emotion, such as the resistance to the percentage that less than1%or more than100%, which led directly to the large number of mistakes; Third, there are some recessive errors during the learning of percent that teachers and students haven’t noticed, for instance, students didn’t have a clear understanding about the comparison of which two objects in the situational context can generate a percent, or reversed the two objects’ comparison order. Through consulted books and literature found that percent actually underwent a long process of development, and established relationship with multiple concepts within discipline and subjects like English and Chinese. On this basis, combined with students errors discovered several problems in classroom teaching:teachers’knowledge is not complete; class activities lack of the foundation of nature and the exploration of relevance; the classroom teaching lack of effective teaching model to provide help; attach great importance to the generation of result but ignore students’ cognitive process. Meanwhile, teaching materials should be perfect about the definition of percent and focus on continuity and rationality of distribution of related concepts, such as ratio and proportion.Based on the education philosophy that "student-centered" and combines the percent knowledge itself, as well as the problems during learning and teaching percent, designed a work sheet of "The understanding of percent". Using the mode of work sheet guidance, thus providing more opportunities for students to think and explore. The purpose is not only to allow students generate accurate understanding of percent in the process of exploration, but also include the development of logic thinking ability and critical ability, and master this method to learn other knowledge analogically, then can truly reflect "people-oriented" education.