Introduction

In Ratios for All Occasions, we feature resources on the concept of the ratio as encountered in middle school: as rates in real-world problems, percents in relation to fractions, scale factors in building models, and comparisons of lengths in geometry. Most of these digital resources are activities that can serve as supplementary or motivational material.

A central theme in the middle school mathematics curriculum, proportional reasoning is based on making sense of ratios in a variety of contexts. The resources chosen for this unit provide practice in solving problems, often informally, in the format of games, hands-on modeling, mapmaking, and questions selected for their interest for students. As students work through the activities, they will exercise reasoning about basic proportions as well as further develop their knowledge of the relationship between fractions and percents.

The section titled Background Resources for Teachers contains links to workshop sessions, developed for teachers, on the mathematical content of the unit. Ratios in Children's Books identifies three picture books that entertain while they explore scale and proportion. In the final section, we look at the coverage of proportionality at the middle level in the NCTM Principles and Standards for School Mathematics.

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by Terese Herrera

Terry Herrera taught math several years at middle and high school levels, then earned a Ph.D. in mathematics education. She is currently a resource specialist for the Middle School Portal. Please email any comments to msp@msteacher.org.

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Copyright June 2006 — The Ohio State University. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0424671. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.