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. + Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox “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 ...
