Abstract:

The primary-school level mathematics curriculum in Bulgaria requires the acquisition of the following properties of the arithmetic operations: commutative property of addition and multiplication, the associative property of addition and multiplication and the distributive property of multiplication and division.
The aim of this paper is to present the variation for teaching the distributive property of multiplication and division developed and experimented by the author in primary school as well as different possibilities for their application in mathematics education.
The experiment was conducted with 96 third-graders, divided into two groups – experimental and control. The author's methodology was integrated in the training of the experimental group. The main criterion for measuring the effectiveness of the presented teaching methodology is the degree of acquisition of competencies by students for the use of the distributive properties of multiplication and division by five main indicators. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the results of the experimental study is presented. The result of the experiment clearly proves that the application of this teaching methodology contributes to the conscious acquisition by 9–10-year-old students of competencies for: finding an unknown number in equations, comparing numerical expressions, calculating products and quotients of two numbers without using multiplication or division tables, solving mathematical dictations, solving problems with geometric content, composing and solving text problems.
The study of the distributive properties of multiplication and division by students in the primary school builds and develops the mathematical thinking of students, which in turn can serve as a basis for studying the school course in mathematics in the next stage of education.

Keywords:

Primary school mathematics education, distributive property of multiplication, distributive property of division.