Before the forth intervention activity, I taught students how to translate and solve percent
problems. The 7-5 activity gave the students two problems: “32 is what percent of 80?” and “40%
of what number is 72?” (Appendix 5) I wanted to check their problem solving abilities versus their
explanation abilities. I chose to give them two problems instead of one so that they had two
choices to practice explaining and solving. After they solved each problem, they wrote
explanations about how and why they solved the problem the way they did. After the
explanations, students exchanged their papers with their partners. They read one another’s
responses and gave feedback on how to make them better. Students had an opportunity to
rewrite their responses.