GCSE Maths: Percentages, Decimals and Fractions

Learn how to use percentages, decimals and fractions together to solve problems. Susan introduces the topic, Bobby applies it to the high-street sales, and Tom talks football transfers with Wilfried Zaha. Direct links to each part below.

Susan (Introduction) 0:50
Bobby (Sale Prices) 7:07
Tom (Football Transfers) 11:23

This is the first lesson in a new series with the Maths Appeal duo Bobby Seagull and Susan Okereke and Tom Rocks Maths where we'll be exploring the GCSE Maths syllabus to show the world that maths is accessible to everyone!

Produced by Dr Tom Crawford at the University of Oxford.

Further resources:
Mixed Percentages resources (Worksheets & videos) - Corbett Maths:
GCSE exam questions (Fractions, Decimals & Percentages) – KeshMaths:
GCSE exam questions (Percentages) – KeshMaths:
GCSE exam questions (Reverse Percentages) – KeshMaths:
GCSE exam questions (Compound Interest & depreciation) – KeshMaths:

Get your Tom Rocks Maths merchandise here:

You can also follow Tom on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @tomrocksmaths.

Follow Maths Appeal on Twitter and YouTube:

Maths Appeal music written and performed by Kele Okereke.
Maths Appeal logo design by Calixte Davis.

[TomRocksMaths]

Check the full description (click 'SHOW MORE') for additional resources on percentages, fractions and decimals recommended by Maths Teacher Susan Okereke.

[johnodee]

Lovely to see such enthusiasm and genuine joy in maths teaching.

[firstnamesecondname]

Excellent for parents whom need to refresh or catch up, or frankly anyone to just relearn 👍

[SanneBerkhuizen]

even if you don't like math.. which is odd in the first place.. this is very nice to wacht

[firstnamesecondname]

It’s a big ask but could you organise a series covering the entire GCSE and A Level Syllabus. To have a structured lesson by lesson library (school) effectively on here could help so many people.

[joshua]

I'm from Scotland, so I never done GCSE's but surely this is too easy for most 15 year olds. When I helped out in a 1st year maths class (12 year olds) they were expected to do 0.41 X 30 without a calculator, but in this video they're told to just use a calculator despite being 3 years older.

[SanneBerkhuizen]

ooh and i looove that chrome-ish nail polish!

[ConradCosta]

Thank u so much I got an A on my maths skills check thank u

[jmda]

Awesome. I feel like I am 15 and I was in Secondary School class.

[logicomix]

Back to school ;)
I remember that the concept of fractions, motivated by many examples of cake pieces :P, wasn´t the true difficulty, because this principle seems to me fundamentally inherent to our understanding even at the young ages. So in my option the true cause for struggle lies within missing understanding of the difference between symbolic notiation of an concept and the concept itself.

What does it mean that 0.1 is equivalent to 10/100 or 1/10 or 10% and therefore why can I use symbolic operations in one "frame of symbolism" tansform the result into another symbolic reperesentation and get same result as I would, if I had done a completely different symbolic operation in the secound "frame of symbolism" on its own:

e.g. 20/100 + 4/100 = 0.24 = 20% + 4%
by the symbolic rule of addition of fractions one get (20+4)/100 which ist equivalent to 0.24 by the transformation rule to count the number a of tenth and b of hundreth und put them into the order 0.ab;
on the other side one could use the symbolic rule of addition of percentages to get (20+4)% which is by that rule equal to 24%, which is equivalent to 0.24 by the transformation rule of ab% <=> 0.ab.


I believe that especially childrens are troubled by that sort of questions, which could be stated as an leck of the understanding of the connection between epistemiological truth of symbolic operations (fractional, decimal and percentage notations) and the ontological truth of properties of things (elements of the set of rational numbers). Of course they wouldn´t state it in that way, but what if they mean exactly that? And we are giving them as a answer more examples and rules of diffrent symbolic frameworks which totally get on their own but they don´t understand the concept of symbolic representation.



The worst case would be that this feeling of conceptional misunderstanding lead to demotivation for math or if the students loose there original sense of understanding by the false conditioning of our (it´s the same in Germany) school system that reward solving problems over understanding concepts. The best teacher in my optinion would be able to connect problem solving strategies and symbolic operations with the understanding of the abstract concept that gets symbolically captured.