“The benefits of chess are strongly tied to “learning” the game,” he wrote, “the more you learn, the more you benefit. Kids who come only to chess club receive a small (5%-10%) benefit in math, whereas kids who play in rated tournaments gain substantially in math (30%-50%) and significantly in reading (10%-20%). The benefits also continue to grow as kids play more tournaments and/or increase their USCF chess rating.”
But does the actual playing of chess improve math skills, or is it just that kids who play chess are smarter to begin with, hence their greater math skills?
Just because A and B happen together doesn’t mean that A caused B. It may be that B caused A, or that both A and B are due to a third cause C.
Bill Smythe
Correlation is not the same as causation.
Yeah, there’s some possible selection bias here. And as I recall, the standards for presenting a paper at SAGE are not as rigorous as those for a refereed publication.
Even then, there’s been a lot of research that shows even experiments that result in published refereed papers can be difficult to reproduce.
But it shows chess in a positive light, and that’s always a good thing.
The standards for presenting a paper practically anywhere are not as rigorous as those for a refereed publication—in most cases it’s only the second step in vetting a paper (the first being distributing it to people who might be able to comment on it, most of whom probably ignore it).
The earliest research did suffer from self-selection bias. Most covered only small groups. Later papers concerning gender performance in gaming were more rigorous, but still had detractors. Real research which is experimentally based, has double blinds, and has methodology for replication is hard to do and get funded. This latest paper, which looks at multiple effects of teaching chess has fewer of the problems and looks at a larger group of players, not just the “smart” kids. Even if it does have flaws, it does indicate a positive effect. It would be interesting to see if learning music, art, or sports have similar effects as a comparison. It very well may be that more types of engagement in schools can lead to better measurable results. If that is so, then the cuts made in many schools over the years in curricular (AP, Gifted, Spec Ed, and enrichment) and extracurricular activities have damaged student ability, at a cost to our economy and society as well as to the individual.
Very interesting is the effect of chess on reading and verbal scores. I have been told that the part of the brain that deals with language is stimulated. Is learning chess like learning a language? Maybe. More research is needed on visualization, structuring of new and old knowledge, vocabulary formation, and thinking patterns. The expectation that learning chess would only affect math or science skills alone was too narrow an approach.
This thread reminds me of a blurb in an old Chess Life & Review magazine [70s or 80s, I can’t remember & have been unable to find it when I look] in the around the US section. A group of 6th graders as a [4H or FFA] project took a group oi 3rd grade mentally retarded children and broke them into 2 groups. The first [control] group they play various games with, while the second group was taught chess. After 3 months the second group showed an increase in results off an IQ test given at the start and finish of the project. I would suspect that more attention was given to the second group as the 6th graders obviously had an interest in chess. The additional attention, rather than the learning of chess. could have been the contributing factor to the increase in IQ test scores.
Larry S. Cohen
i believe “intellectual disability” is the preferred term now.
…scot…
One of the USCF’s scholastic pamphlets by Gerard Dullea starts on page 16 of this pdf. I had been running a scholastic program through a civic club for over ten years starting in 1980 and this is from some notes I had from it.