Dept of Mathematics Education seminar: 21 January 2026

Presentation by Catherine Thevenot

Teams link:

https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_ZTMxMGFiMDEtNzA0Yy00Y2U5LTkwODQtZjZkYWEzMGZlMGIx%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cf264fc0-aeb8-449f-9054-82ce4454084b%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%228872a26c-52a5-47d9-9adb-83b0d06e71c9%22%7d

[14:00-15:00] (40 mins Presentation + 20 mins Q&A): Prof Catherine Thevenot

University of Lausanne

[catherine.thevenot@unil.ch]  

A longitudinal and interventional approach to finger counting in early arithmetic development

Abstract

Although preschool and early primary school teachers in England generally hold positive attitudes toward finger counting, viewing it as a useful tool for supporting children’s early arithmetic, they nevertheless tend to associate this strategy with pupils who experience mathematical difficulties. A substantial body of work from my laboratory challenges this assumption. Our findings indicate that finger counting is not merely a compensatory strategy for struggling children but, on the contrary, is associated with more advanced cognitive and numerical competencies. More precisely, we have established that children aged 4½ to 6½ who use their fingers to solve addition problems show higher fluid reasoning abilities, greater working-memory resources, more robust number-concept knowledge, and better overall addition performance than children who do not use this strategy.

Crucially, we have shown that finger counting is not simply a transient supportive strategy that eventually leads children into a dead end when quantities can no longer be represented on the fingers. On the contrary, children who use their fingers early in development are also those who transition earlier to efficient mental calculation strategies and present the best performance at 7 ½.  Finally, evidence from a series of intervention studies supports the idea that the relationship between finger use and arithmetic performance is likely to be causal, as training finger-based calculation in children who had not yet spontaneously adopted this strategy led to substantial gains on addition tasks.

Together, these findings invite a reconsideration of the role of finger counting in early arithmetic development and question the widespread assumption that it reflects mathematical weakness.