existentialtyke:

Why do primary schools, in particular, persist with 'chunking' division when 'bus stop' is so much more straightforward? I have known many children who have found division impenetrable due to chunking, only to pick it up quickly once the bus stop method is used.

It's a mental method that works.

I mean, no one does "bus shelter" in their heads, do they?

(I think the real difficulty is the ordering here - we should start with "sharing out"; actual physical sharing out of counters, cups or whatever is in the resources cupboard from the last fad.

Then move on to obvious integer division from recognition of multiples in the times tables

Then move on to long division

Then bring in the two short cut tricks - "chunking" for mental maths and "reality checks" and "bus shelter" for pen and paper division where the numbers are small.

chunking that on paper is plain daft

i'm not saying no one does it, 'cos folk are plain daft, but as an objection - well, you might as well object to hand sewing because anyone with a king size sheet to hem will use a machine

you'd still hand sew the hem you caught on the way to school

mind you - bus stopping 24334/78 seems pretty pointless to me too - surely that's why god invented calculators

and the skill should be - knowing when to chunk, when to bus stop, when to use a calulator, and for that matter, when to use a spreadsheet instead

florapost, sick of checking other teachers' admin stats cos they haven't had the sense to create a spreadsheet in the first place

We use chunking because it is the next logical step after division as repeated subtraction on  a number line. Chunking follows the same procedure , just in a written rather than a diagramatic way. So the children can see WHY they chunk. The same can't always be said of the bus stop, they don't understand what they are doing, subtracting from the left rather than the right is counterintuitive for them and, whilst you can teach them to follow the methd, if they don't understand WHY they find it difficult to spot mistakes in their method ( whilst with chunking they make mistakes but they find it easier to spot where they have gone wrong!)

That's the theory anyway!

Polecat:

However, I'm interested in polynomial division, and I wonder what 'clunking' and 'bus stopping' become in that scenario.

Hasn't polynomial division been largely replaced by synthetic division now?

I once read a nice piece of research that suggested that C grade A Level students could be taught synthetic division and polynomial division equally easily but, when tested a few weeks later, had much greater retention of the synthetic method.   There was no measurable difference for A grade students.

From the OCR Core 4 specification:

"Candidates should be able to divide a polynomial, of degree not exceeding 4, by a linear or quadratic polynomial, and identify the quotient and remainder (which may be zero)"