Fingers make numbers clear. Photo: Shutterstock
According to a study, kindergarten children aged five to six can do arithmetic better if they use their fingers. The researchers therefore recommend teaching children of this age to count with their fingers if they have not done so before. This will significantly improve their arithmetic skills.
“Our results are very valuable because they provide, for the first time, a concrete answer to the long-standing question of whether teachers should explicitly teach children to use their fingers to solve addition problems – especially those who do not do this naturally,” said lead author Catherine Thevenot of the Institute of Psychology at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. “The answer is yes. Our study shows that training finger counting is effective in over 75 percent of kindergarten children.”
Thevenot was surprised by the extent of the improvement observed. “When I first saw the results, I was amazed at the enormous improvement in performance among the children who had not initially used their fingers to solve the tasks. Before our intervention, these children could only solve about a third of the addition tasks in the pre-test. After training, however, they solved over three quarters of them! The difference was remarkable, especially compared to the control groups, where the progress was insignificant. The extent of this improvement really exceeded my expectations,” she explained.
“We want to know whether our intervention has led to a deeper understanding of numbers”
“The next step is to explore how we can support the remaining 25 percent of children who did not respond so well to the intervention,” added Thevenot. The study, published in the journal Child Development, focused primarily on 328 five- and six-year-old kindergarten children, mainly living in France, and tested their ability to solve simple addition problems.
In addition, the researcher now wants to know “whether what we taught the children goes beyond a mere procedure for solving the tasks. In other words, we want to know whether our intervention has led to a deeper understanding of numbers, in particular whether the children have a better understanding of how to manipulate the quantities represented by their fingers.”
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