Elaboration on this Achievement Objective
This means students will generalise, which means to establish properties that hold for all occurrences. This involves the ability to look at several examples, notice what changes (variables) and what does not, use appropriate mathematical terminology and symbols to describe the pattern, and apply the generalisation to other examples. At Level Four students should be able to describe and apply the properties of multiplication and division as these operations apply to whole numbers. These properties include commutativity, distributivity, associativity, inverse and identity. This includes the ability to express generalisations using words and symbols, for example 4 x 6 = 24 so 24 ÷ 6 = 4 and 24 ÷ 4 = 6 (example) leading to a x b = c so c ÷ b = a and c ÷ a = b. This is the inverse relationship of multiplication and division.