For more than two thousand years, mathematics has been a part of the human

search for understanding. Mathematical discoveries have come both from the attempt to
describe the natural world and from the desire to arrive at a form of inescapable truth from
careful reasoning. These remain fruitful and important motivations for mathematical thinking,
but in the last century mathematics has been successfully applied to many other aspects of
the human world: voting trends in politics, the dating of ancient artifacts, the analysis of
automobile traffic patterns, and long-term strategies for the sustainable harvest of deciduous
forests, to mention a few. Today, mathematics as a mode of thought and expression is more
valuable than ever before. Learning to think in mathematical terms is an essential part of
becoming a liberally educated person.

An argument is made that mathematics is important because it encourages and

develops important ways of thinking. For example, the  Vorderman report states that
mathematics is ‘critical in fostering logical and rigorous thinking’ (Vorderman, 2011).

Many Filipino students tend to hate math, even claiming it’s not one of their favorite
subjects in school.And who can blame them; after all, schools teach math through drills and
memorization, methods which are neither effective nor enjoyable for young learners.

Percentage is a mathematics topic that is learned in elementary schools. It is one of

the topics that elementary pupils have difficulty in comprehending. Analysing the difficulties
on the topics is important for teachers, as an attempt to do a reflection of the learning
process and as a reference in devising a learning plan, including for anticipation of the
possibility of these barriers that might appear in the next learning process.

One of the reasons many elementary pupils experience difficulty interpreting and
using ratios, rates and percent, is that they have not yet acquired a capacity for proportional
reasoning. This is a complex form of reasoning that depends on many interconnected ideas
and strategies developed over a long period of time.

Students typically find word problems difficult due to various reasons: they are weak
in the Mathematical language; they have limited understanding of the arithmetic operations;
they are unable to relate the knowns to the unknowns when the problem structure is difficult
to understand; and they are unable to analyze problem situations.

Since the early 1980s, a distinguishing characteristic of the math taught in Singapore
—a top performing nation as seen on the Trends in International Math and Science Study
(TIMSS) reports of 1995, 1999, 2003, and 2007—is the use of “model drawing”. Model
drawing, often called “bar modeling” in the U.S., is a systematic method of representing word
problems and number relationships that is explicitly taught beginning in second grade and
extending all the way to secondary algebra. Students are taught to use rectangular “bars” to
represent the relationship between known and unknown numerical quantities and to solve
problems related to these quantities.

The secret behind model drawing is that it gives students a concrete, reliable set of
seven steps that they can use to solve 80% of the word problems out there. They won't have
to memorize 20 different techniques and know when to use which anymore. Instead, they'll
learn how to read the problem, determine its variables, draw a unit bar (the visual model),
adjust that bar, place the question mark to indicate what they're solving for, do the
computation and write a complete sentence at the end