By Stephen Beech via SWNS
Counting on fingers really does help youngsters improve their maths skills, according to a new study.
The research is the first to show that children’s performance in arithmetic can show a “huge” improvement through the teaching of a finger-counting method.
Some teachers consider finger counting a signal that children are struggling with maths, while others associate its use as advanced numerical knowledge.
Swiss and French researchers explored whether finger counting can help primary school-aged children to solve maths problems in a new study, published in the journal Child Development.
The team said adults rarely use their fingers to calculate a small sum as such behavior could be attributed to “pathological difficulties” in mathematics or cognitive impairments.
But young children who use their fingers to solve such problems are recognized as intelligent, probably because they have already reached a level that allows them to understand that a quantity can be represented by different means.
It is only from the age of eight that using finger counting to solve very simple problems can indicate maths difficulties, according to the study.
The research aimed to determine whether children who don’t count on their fingers can be trained to do so, and whether such training would result in enhanced arithmetic performance.
The study focused on 328 five- and six-year-old children at kindergarten, mainly living in France, and tested their abilities to solve simple addition problems.
Participating children were recruited through their teachers who voluntarily took part in the experiment.
The study included a pre-test, training held over two weeks, a post-test closely after the training’s end, and a delayed post-test.
The results showed an “important increase” in performance between pre-and post-test for the trained children who did not count on their fingers originally – from 37% to 77% of correct responses – compared to non-finger users in the control group.
The research team suggests that since children who use their fingers to help solve math problems outperform those who do not, teaching a finger-counting strategy could help reduce inequity among children in math.
However, they say whether children who use finger counting are using it as an arithmetic procedure or understand something deeper about numbers will still need to be determined with future research.
Study leader Dr. Catherine Thevenot said: “Our findings are highly valuable because, for the first time, we provide a concrete answer to the long-standing question of whether teachers should explicitly teach children to use their fingers for solving addition problems – especially those who don’t do so naturally.
“Our study demonstrates that finger calculation training is effective for over 75% of kindergartners.
“The next step is to explore how we can support the remaining 25% of children who didn’t respond as well to the intervention.”
Dr. Thevenot, of the Institute of Psychology at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, says the study came about as a result of conversations with primary school teachers.
She said: “They often asked me whether they should encourage or discourage children from using their fingers to solve calculations.
“Surprisingly, the existing research didn’t offer a clear answer, which left teachers understandably frustrated with my frequent response of ‘I don’t know.’
“This recurring question, coupled with the lack of concrete evidence, inspired me to investigate the issue myself.
“The best way to provide a meaningful answer was through experimental studies – so that’s exactly what I set out to do.
“When I first saw the results, I was amazed by the huge improvement in performance among children who didn’t initially use their fingers to solve the problems.
“Before our intervention, these children were only able to solve about one-third of the addition problems at pre-test.
“After training, however, they were solving over three-quarters of them.
“The difference was striking, especially compared to the control groups, where gains were insignificant.
“The extent of this improvement truly exceeded my expectations.”
Dr. Thevenot added: “An important question now is to determine whether what we taught to children goes beyond a mere procedure to solve the problems.
“In other words, we want to know whether our intervention led to a deeper conceptual understanding of numbers, specifically whether children better grasp how to manipulate the quantities represented by their fingers.
“In fact, we have already started addressing this question and the initial results are very promising.
“However, we still need to carry out additional experiments to confirm that these improvements are indeed a direct result of our training program.”
