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This paper reports an investigation of students understanding of distributive law used to facilitate students awareness of equations is an equivalent expression where each equation can be replaced by an equivalent equation. A total of 53 students from one secondary school were randomly selected to participate in the study using this cross-sectional approach. The results of the study indicate that the use of operation sense of students in understanding distributive law can be grouped into three levels where level 2 is the transition stage (i.e a pre-algebraic stage) from level 1 to level 3. Students who have been proficient in using distributive law in arithmetic, still have difficulty in applying it to algebraic manipulation. One of the causes of this difficulty is the lack of students understanding of the same sign as a sign of equality. In addition, the absence of parentheses also seems to be a stumbling block for students in recognizing distributive law. The reason for expanding the notion of the same sign by using distributive traits is to provide a foundation for their operation sense construction so as to provide further meaning for equations in algebra and minimize student difficulties in learning school algebra.