Analysis of the performance in mathematics in children of 5 years and their correlation with the ability to produce numbers with their fingers

Resumen

Fingers have shown to be relevant for the numerical development of different cultures(Di Luca & Pesenti, 2011, Eels, 1913, Pica, Lemer, Izard & Dehaene, 2004) as theyhelp people to understand the concept of numerical magnitude. With fingers, we areable to represent numerical magnitudes and reflect their meaning (Roesch & Moeller,2015). Moreover, it has been proved that children use fingers to represent numbers evenbefore learning their symbolic representations (Gracia-Bafalluy & Noël, 2008). In thisline, the present study intends to analyze if the ability of 5-year-old children showingfingers to produce numbers, by itself, correlates with their mathematics performance. Tothis end, a total of 95 students from the third year of preschool Education have beenassessed, in three different aspects: their ability to show numbers from 1 to 10 with theirfingers, their performance in the symbolic magnitude comparison task (1 to 9) and theirperformance in mathematics (using the standardized test, BADyG); in addition, nonverbal intelligence and their knowledge of digits have been controlled. The resultsobtained by Pearson correlation analyses, showed significant associations (p <.01)between the accuracy (AC) and the reaction time (RT) of the task of producing numberswith fingers and mathematics performance (BADyG), after controlling for intelligenceand number’s knowledge. Based on these results, we conclude that the correlationbetween the ability of 5-year-old children to show numbers with the fingers and theirmathematics performance justifies the inclusion of these kind of tasks in their academiceducation.