The Importance Of Finger Counting For Children

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Finger counting has been commonly practiced to facilitate children’s numerical development across cultures and times (Butterworth, 1999; Domas, Moeller, Huber, Willmes, & Nuerk, 2010). During early stages of development, fingers and external objects are often used to help children understand basic numerical concepts such as numerical quantity, the counting system and the symbolic representations using Arabic digits. The external numerical representation using fingers help children understand the one-to-one correspondence principle in meaningfully forming their fundamental knowledge in numeracy. Finger counting is considered a readily available and concrete scaffolding tool which aids calculation before children can master more advanced and adaptive cognitive strategies such as …show more content…

(2004) which compared strategy choices among first-grade, third-grade and fifth-grade students. In this cross-sectional study, during the completion of simple and complex addition tasks, children with MD adopted finger counting as a strategy more often and made more mistakes than their peers without MD. The difference was most notable in first grade, but also seen in third grade and fifth grade, suggesting that finger counting remains a preferred strategy for children with MD. While this study shows the association between strategy choices and working memory capacity, it cannot clarify the causal relationship which questions whether finger counting is beneficial or detrimental to children with poor working memory. It is not clear whether students use more finger counting because it is the only strategy they feel confident and resourceful of, or it is a useful strategy in offloading their cognitive load. Should teachers feel comfortable to encourage weaker students to count on their fingers in calculation or it would do more harm by giving these students a less adaptive

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