Finger counting boosts kindergarten math performance in new study

Adults rarely use their fingers to calculate a small sum (e.g., 3+2) as such behaviors could be attributed to pathological difficulties in mathematics or cognitive impairments. However, young children between the ages of four and six who use their fingers to solve such problems are recognized as intelligent, probably because they have already reached the level of abstraction allowing 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 math difficulties.

The current study aimed to determine whether children who do not count on their fingers can be trained to do so and whether this training would result in enhanced arithmetic performance. The study focused on 328 five and six-year-old kindergarteners (mainly White European living in France) and tested their abilities to solve simple addition problems.

The results show 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 (from 40% to 48%). These results were replicated in an experiment with an active control group instead of a passive control group. This is the first study to show that children's performance in arithmetic can be improved through explicit teaching of a finger counting strategy.

SRCD: How can these findings be useful for teachers, practitioners and caregivers?

Source:

Society for Research in Child Development

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