17/02/2020
Fingers are so kmportant so many nerve endings leading straight to the brain.
If you want your child to be good at mathematics, it’s important— and — that they begin by counting on their fingers.
“A mother called me to report that her 5-year-old daughter had come home from school crying because her teacher had not allowed her to count on her fingers.” — This is not an isolated event. Schools regularly ban finger use in classrooms or communicate to students that they are ‘babyish’ for following their to make representations with their fingers when engaging in mathematics. This is despite compelling areas of that show the importance of a part of our that “sees” fingers, well beyond the time and age that people use their fingers to count.
Neuroscientists often debate why finger knowledge predicts mathematics achievement, but they clearly agree on one thing: It does. And that knowledge is critical.
As Brian Butterworth, a leading researcher in this area, has written, if students aren’t learning about numbers through thinking about their fingers, numbers “will never have a normal representation in the brain.” In fact, the quality of the 6-year-old’s finger representation was a better predictor of future performance on mathematics tests than their scores on tests of cognitive processing.
In a study published last year, the researchers Ilaria Berteletti and James R. Booth analysed a specific region of our brain that is dedicated to the perception and representation of fingers known as the somatosensory finger area. Remarkably, brain researchers know that we “see” a representation of our fingers in our brains, even when we do not use fingers in a calculation. The researchers found that when 8-to-13-year-olds were given complex subtraction problems, the finger area lit up, even though the students did not use their fingers. This finger-representation area was, according to their study, also engaged to a greater extent with more complex problems that involved higher numbers and more manipulation.
Other researchers have found that the better students’ knowledge of their fingers was in the first grade, the higher they scored on number comparison and estimation in the second grade. Even university students’ finger perception predicted their calculation scores.
One of the recommendations of the neuroscientists conducting these important studies is that schools focus on finger discrimination—not only on number counting via their fingers but also on helping students distinguish between those fingers. Still, schools typically pay little if any attention to finger discrimination, and few curriculums encourage this kind of mathematical work. Instead, many teachers have been led to believe that finger use is useless and something to be abandoned as quickly as possible.
Finger research is part of a larger group of studies on cognition and the brain showing the importance of visual engagement with mathematics. Our brains are made up of “distributed networks,” and when we handle knowledge, different areas of the brain communicate with each other. When we work on mathematics, in particular, brain activity is distributed among many different networks, which include areas within the ventral and dorsal pathways, both of which are visual. Neuroimaging has shown that even when people work on a number calculation, such as 12 x 25, with symbolic digits (12 and 25) our mathematical thinking is grounded in visual processing.
And people who are not strong visual thinkers probably need visual thinking more than anyone. Everyone uses visual pathways when we work on mathematics. The problem is it has been presented, for decades, as a subject of numbers and symbols, ignoring the potential of visual methods for transforming students’ mathematics experiences and developing important brain pathways.
To engage students in productive visual thinking, they should be asked, at regular intervals, how they see mathematical ideas, and to draw what they see. They can be given activities with visual questions and they can be asked to provide visual solutions to questions. Such activities not only offer deep engagement, new understandings, and visual-brain activity, but they show students that mathematics can be an open and beautiful subject, rather than fixed, closed and impenetrable. (👁 Look in comments below to download free PDFs of such activities).
Stopping students from using their fingers when they count could, according to brain research, be akin to halting their mathematical development. Fingers are probably one of our most useful visual aids, and the finger area of our brain is used well into adulthood.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4360562/
https://carleton.ca/cmi/wp-content/uploads/CSS07_pp740-penner-wilger.pdf
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/04/why-kids-should-use-their-fingers-in-math-class/478053/
