Counting on Fingers Really Helps Kids Improve Their Math Skills–By 40% New Study Shows

By Yan Krukau via Public Domain on PexelsSome teachers consider finger counting a signal that youngsters are struggling with math, while others associate its use as advanced numerical knowledge.Now, new research is the first to show that children’s performance in arithmetic can show a “huge” improvement through the teaching of a finger-counting method.Swiss and French teams explored whether finger counting can help primary-school-aged children to solve math problems. They said adults rarely use their fingers to calculate a small sum, because such behavior could be attributed to cognitive impairments or “pathological difficulties” in math.But young children under age 8 who use their fingers to solve such problems may be seen as intelligent, probably because they have already reached a level that allows them to understand that a quantity can be represented by different means.The research aimed to determine whether children who don’t count on their fingers can be trained to do so, and whether such training would result in enhanced arithmetic performance.The study, published in the journal Child Development, focused on 328 five- and six-year-old children at kindergarten, mainly living in France, and tested their abilities to solve simple addition problems.The kindergarteners were recruited through their teachers, who voluntarily took...

Read More........→September 23, 2024

Dads show gender biases, in both brain responses and behaviors, toward toddlers

“Our study provides one of the richest datasets for fathers now available,” says Emory neuroscientist Jennifer Mascaro. (Stock image)By Carol Clark: A toddler’s gender influences the brain responses as well as the behavior of fathers — from how attentive they are to their child, to the types of language that they use and the play that they engage in, a new study by Emory University finds.The journal Behavioral Neuroscience published the study, the first to combine brain scans of fathers with behavioral data collected as fathers interacted with their children in a real-world setting.One of the more striking behavioral differences was the level of attention given a child.“When a child cried out or asked for Dad, fathers of daughters responded to that more than did fathers of sons,” says Jennifer Mascaro, who led the research as a post-doctoral fellow in the lab of Emory anthropologist James Rilling, senior author of the study. “We should be aware of how unconscious notions of gender can play into the way we treat even very young children.”Mascaro is now an assistant professor in Family and Preventive Medicine at the Emory School of Medicine.In addition to being more attentive, fathers of daughters sang more often to their child and were more likely to use words associated with sad emotions, such as “cry,” “tears” and “lonely.” Fathers...

Read More........→July 16, 2024