Educational benefits of chess instruction: A critical review

1 Introduction " Chess playing makes kids smarter. " " Chess increases mathematical abilities. " " Chess improves academic performance. " Numerous similar claims have been made about the efficacy of using chess to foster education (see, for example, several papers on the USCF site for education). Argentina) offer chess as an optional subject, and some even propose compulsory classes. There is clearly a strong interest worldwide in the potential advantages of chess in education, and the conference from which this book stems is just another example of this interest. Implicit in all these activities is the belief that skills acquired playing chess can transfer to other domains. Is this belief based on well-substantiated evidence? Is the educational value of chess a well-established empirical fact? Or have chess players been blinded by their love of the game into thinking that it offers instructional advantages? In this chapter, we attempt, as objectively as possible, to tackle the question of whether chess is advantageous for general education. To do so, we subject research into the educational benefits of chess to the same rigorous criteria commonly used in academia for evaluating educational research. First, we briefly review how psychology and education deal with the question of transfer of skills from one area of knowledge to another. We then look at whether chessplayers as a group differ from the population at large—if playing chess promotes transferable skills, some differences should be visible, for example in IQ, visuo-spatial abilities, or planning behavior. Further, we consider what type of experiment should ideally be carried out to establish the presence of transfer. Having dealt with these preliminaries, we will be in a position to discuss the results from previous experimental studies that attempted to establish transfer from chess abilities to general abilities. We shall see that, in contrast to the strong claims often found in chess literature, the evidence is rather inconclusive, and, most importantly, somewhat rare. 2 Given these negative conclusions, it may be appropriate to state that the authors do not suffer from disinterest nor have an axe to grind with regard to chess. The first author, an international master, has taught chess for several years in high school. The second author, an expert, has also been active in scholastic chess and in coaching top-level Argentinean players. 25/1/05 3 out of 28 We end this chapter with a few proposals on how research into the …