Factors, multiples and prime numbers

What does research suggest about the teaching around factors, multiples and prime numbers?

Decomposing numbers to investigate their multiplicative structure can support a flexible approach to problem solving and should come before the introduction of rules or procedures
Activities in which students: sort objects into regular arrays of width two; explore which numbers can be split into two equal groups; and also into equal groups of two, all support conceptual understanding that even numbers are divisible by two
Students need to link doubling to multiplying in order to appreciate that it will always result in an even number
Visualising building numbers by scaling or growing, rather than by repeated addition, helps support multiplicative reasoning and generalising
Working with characteristics of primes can help avoid misconceptions about their size and prevalence as factors of other numbers
Practising seeing prime factors both individually or in combinations, can help support flexible reasoning about the divisibility of the whole number
Making links between different methods of finding the lowest common multiple of two numbers can support conceptual understanding; Venn diagrams are suggested as useful ways to visualise common prime factors of two numbers

View Espresso