Des doigts et des nombres

Finger counting training enhances addition performance in kindergarteners

Our study on 328 five- to six-year-old kindergarteners (mainly White European living in France, 152 girls) shows that children who do not count on their fingers and undergo finger counting training exhibit drastic improvement in their addition skills from pre-test to post-test (i.e., accuracy from 37.3% to 77.1%) compared to a passive control group (39.6% to 47.8%) (p < .001,η p 2  = .15). This result was replicated on a much smaller scale (37 five- to six-year-olds, mainly White European, 22 girls) but in more controlled setup and was further replicated with an active control group (84 five- to six-year-olds, mainly White European, 37 girls). Therefore, we demonstrate here for the first time that training finger counting constitutes a highly effective method to improve kindergarteners' arithmetic performance.

French preschool and primary teachers' attitude towards finger counting

Teachers' beliefs and attitudes are known to guide the type of activities they implement in their classrooms. A traditional conception that finger counting is merely a back-up when children fail to use more sophisticated and efficient strategies could therefore prevent teachers from encouraging children's use of fingers in arithmetic tasks. However, the potential benefit of finger counting for young learners has been recently documented and setting aside its practice within classrooms may hinder children's mathematical skill development. It is therefore important to establish whether there is a discrepancy between teacher's beliefs regarding finger counting and the latest discoveries in this field of research. To this aim, we interrogated 413 teachers from preschool to Grade 5. We found that, despite being generally positive towards finger counting, teachers think that finger counting is typical of children who present math difficulties or lack of confidence, even during the first years of learning. These results are discussed considering what is known and what remains to be determined in the current scientific literature.

Evaluation des bénéfices d’un dispositif d’entraînement à l’usage des doigts en mathématiques

Numerous studies have shown a significant positive relationship between the mental representation of hands in young children and their calculation performance. The literature indicates that certain components of manual motor skills may be critical to the quality of this relationship. The main objective of this study is to measure the benefit of an explicit training and teaching device for finger use in mathematics by measuring the initial motor imitation abilities of young children. A protocol of pretest, training, and post-test type was proposed to 101 children with an average age of 5 years and 3 months. Measurements focused on manual motor skills and arithmetical skills. The 12-week classroom-based device was designed to develop manual motor skills and explicitly teach finger use in mathematics. The results indicate that significant progress was made in arithmetic for the students who benefited from the training. Interestingly this progress is modulated by the children’s initial motor imitation skills. This contribution opens up new research and application perspectives on the relationships between mental motor imagery, fine motor skills, and arithmetic ability.

Processing of numerical representation of fingers depends on their location in space

Fingers can express quantities and thus contribute to the acquisition and manipulation of numbers as well as the development of arithmetical skills. As embodied entities, the processing of finger numerical configurations should, therefore, be facilitated when they match shared cultural representations and are presented close to the body. To investigate these issues, the present study investigated whether canonical finger configurations are processed faster than noncanonical configurations or spatially matched dot configurations, taking into account their location in the peripersonal or the extrapersonal space. Analysis of verbal responses to the enumeration of small and large numerosities showed that participants (N = 30) processed small numerosities faster than large ones and dots faster than finger configurations despite visuo-spatial matching. Canonical configurations were also processed faster than noncanonical configurations but for finger numerical stimuli only. Furthermore, the difference in response time between dots and fingers processing was greater when the stimuli were located in the peripersonal space than in the extrapersonal space. As a whole, the data suggest that, due to their motor nature, finger numerical configurations are not processed as simple visual stimuli but in relation to corporal and cultural counting habits, in agreement with the embodied framework of numerical cognition.