By Brian Jerauld
The rhetoric has floated around for decades.
“It develops your memory, improves your test scores — chess is good for your brains!” They always say. “It boosts your math! And it helps your science! Chock full of cognitive benefits, indeed!”
By now, the claim that chess comes packaged with hidden educational perks is a hype certainly heard around the world. And how could it not be believed? Just find some random piece of research that supports such big talk, tie it together with obvious, awesome-sounding hyperbole — like “decision-making skills” and “higher-order thinking” — and boom: You’ve got yourself some Grade-A propaganda.
Over the years, all this talk has given a rather rosy-colored narrative that always ends in support of chess curriculum implementation. But recently, the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis, whose scholastic program branched out to more than 3,000 students and hundreds of area schools last year, dropped the rhetoric and set out to discover if chess actually has an effect on its students.
Empirically, can all the talk walk the walk?
A year ago, the CCSCSL set out to apply a rigorous and critical eye of existing chess studies by commissioning Basis Policy Research, an independent research firm that focuses on K-12 educational exploration. The goal was to survey the entire landscape of existing chess research, digging back through more than four decades of random studies, and compile a literature review of what was actually known about chess’ impact on student outcomes.
“We found an initial group of studies that met a very general preset criteria, meant only for research that looked at chess programming with an outcome measure that was not chess-related,” said Anna Nicotera, a senior associate at Basis and lead author of the chess literature review. “For instance, some studies studied outcomes that examined overall chess skills, like ‘Did this help students increase their chess rating?’ Instead, we were looking for a set of outcome measures that included student performance — math test scores, cognitive performance and behavioral.”
Basis narrowed its review down to 24 studies focusing on research of K-12 students as well as only studies that offered randomized assignment for both treatment and control groups. Roughly half studied “after-school” chess interventions, such as a competitive scholastic chess club, or “in school” intervention, more closely related to the scholastic programming offered by the CCSCSL.
“‘After school’ programming were attempts to provides chess skills, such as kids who wanted to compete in chess through tournament play and were part of a chess club,” Nicotera said. “The in-school programs were much more related to what the CCSCSL is doing scholastically, having a broader mission in using chess to think about strategic problems overall, and other things that are related to academic performance.”
The collective findings were extremely positive — and actually, very well in stride with all the decades-old rhetoric. The “after school” studies suggested that chess intervention brought a positive and sizable, statistically and educationally significant, effect on math test scores. The “in school” studies corroborated the sizable boost to math test scores, with a further positive impact on cognitive measures.
And the idea of using chess as a springboard for other academic skills? … it had an impact on student performance for both math and cognitive measures with an effect size that was relatively large compared to other programming
