We report on 25 Year 5-6 students' written responses to two items taken from an assessment of mental computation fluency with multiplication, alongside their reasoning of the strategy they had employed, which may or may not have made use of the associative property. Coding of this interview data revealed four distinct levels of conceptual…

The relationships between three critical elements, and the associated mathematical language, to assist students to make the critical transition from additive to multiplicative thinking are examined in this article by Chris Hurst.