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 so 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.”
“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.
The researchers from France and Switzerland also refer to previous studies which show that young children who do math with their fingers are considered intelligent because they have already reached the level of abstraction to understand that a quantity can be represented in different ways. It is only from the age of eight that counting with the fingers can indicate mathematical difficulties.
© dpa-infocom, dpa:240918-930-235923/1
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