Developing Proportional Reasoning N6

In this resource from the DfE Standards Unit, students reflect on the reasoning they currently use when solving proportion problems, examine proportion problems and appreciate their
multiplicative structure and create their own variants of proportion problems. Proportional reasoning is notoriously difficult for many students and many have difficulty in recognising the multiplicative structures that underlie proportion problems. Instead, they use addition methods,
or informal methods using doubling, halving and adding. This session aims to expose and build on this prior learning. Students are given four direct proportion problems to solve, taken
from different areas of the mathematics curriculum. They then compare their methods for solving these with methods produced by other students. This leads to a discussion that compares the use of more primitive informal methods that use adding, doubling and
halving with the use of more sophisticated methods that use multiplication. (GCSE grades D -F)