August• 2017 | 69discourage children from counting on
their fingers.
“Telling students not to use their fin-
gers to count or represent quantities is
akin to halting their mathematical de-
velopment,” says Jo Boaler, a professor
of maths education at Stanford Uni-
versity. However, this discouragement
may be more rampant than you think- a 2013 mail-out from
Kumon, an interna-
tional tutoring service,
carried an article titled,
‘Why Finger Counting
Is a No-No!’
ResearchersatStan-
ford University also
stress that some stu-
dents simply learn
better using visual
toolsratherthanby
memorising the multi-
plication tables and reciting them as
quicklyaspossible.“WhenIintro-
ducemathsproblemstomyStanford
students, I say, ‘I don’t care about
speed; in fact, I am unimpressed by
those who finish quickly. That shows
youarenotthinkingdeeply,’”says
Boaler. “Instead I would like to see
interesting and creative representa-
tions of ideas.”
Boaler believes that anyone – at
any age – looking to improve his or
her maths ability would do well to
improve basic finger dexterity. That
means not only counting on your
digits but also sharpening general
finger ‘perception’.
area, that activates when we respond
to heat, pressure, pain or the use of
a given finger. Studying brain scans,
researchers discovered that when stu-
dents aged from eight to 13 work on
subtraction equations, the somato-
sensory region lights up, even if the
students aren’t using their fingers.
The more complex the subtraction
problem, the more ac-
tivity is detected in the
somatosensory region.
The researchers theo-
rise that when the brain
is called on to subtract,
it automatically mar-
shals its finger-count-
ing ability to get the
job done, regardless
of whether any actual
fingers are doing the
counting.
The connection between finger
use and mathematical ability has
been demonstrated on old-fashioned
maths tests as well. With their eyes
closed, first graders were asked to
identify which of their fingers a re-
searcher was touching, along with
other finger-related exercises. A year
later, the students who scored highest
on the finger-ID questions consistently
scored higher on a maths test. When
high school students were given the
same finger quiz, the highest scorers
once again performed best on calcula-
tion tests.
So what does all this mean? For one
thing, parents and teachers shouldn’t
The more aware
students are of
their individual
fingers, the
higher they score
on maths tests