Swiss study: kindergarten children calculate much better with their fingers

Kindergarten children calculate much better with their fingers Keystone-SDA

Counting with their fingers makes kindergarten children better at arithmetic. According to a study by the University of Lausanne, five to six-year-olds significantly improved their addition skills when they used their fingers to help them.

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“When I saw the results for the first time, I was amazed at the enormous increase in performance among the children who had not initially used their fingers to solve the tasks,” said Catherine Thevenot, who led the study, on Wednesday at the request of the Keystone-SDA news agency. Thevenot is a professor at the Institute of Psychology at the University of Lausanne.

In a previous study, Thevenot showed that children who calculate with their fingers at this age perform better in arithmetic than children who do not use their fingers. “So we wondered if it was possible to teach children who don’t use their fingers how to do so in order to improve their performance,” Thevenot said.

For the study published on Wednesday in the specialist journal Child Development, the researchers taught over 300 kindergarten children to do arithmetic with their fingers. Before this finger arithmetic training, these children were able to solve around a third of the addition problems correctly. After the training, they solved over three quarters of the tasks correctly. A control group made hardly any progress in arithmetic skills over the same period.

This information is particularly important for preschool teachers, the researchers noted in the study. This is because many teachers believe that children counting with their fingers is a sign that they are struggling with math. However, counting with fingers can only indicate mathematical difficulties from the age of eight.

Translated from German by DeepL/jdp

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