Studies suggest that good chess players are better at recognizing and remembering certain configurations of chess pieces. But chess experts aren’t necessarily any better at recognizing patterns in other contexts (Gobet and Campitelli 2006). And while chess players tend to be more intelligent than non-chess players, the correlation may reflect self-selection: Smarter people may be more likely to play chess (Gobet and Campitelli 2006).What we need are rigorous experiments. We need kids to be randomly assigned to treatment or control groups. We need students and teachers to be kept ignorant of the purpose of the experiment. And we need to test students before and after the intervention.As noted by Fernand Gobet and Guillermo Campitelli, very few studies of chess meet these standards. And the situation for board games in general isn't much better. But here are some exceptions:
• Chess. In one study of kids with learning disabilities, researchers assigned students to receive either 5 hours of math instruction each week OR 4 hours of math and 1 hour of chess instruction each week. The kids were tested at the beginning of the school year and again at the end. The students who’d received chess lessons showed more improvement in basic math skills like counting and addition (Scholtz et al 2008).• Number-line board games for kids. In two independent experiments, some preschoolers were assigned to play “number line" board games—-i.e., games in which players move game pieces through a series of sequentially-numbered spaces. Before and after the intervention, the kids were given several math tasks. Whereas kids in control groups experienced no improvement, the kids who had played numerical board games had developed superior math skills.
• Mastermind. Studies using the game Mastermind, have yielded mixed results. When college students were assigned to play the game, they experienced improvements in their critical thinking skills, making fewer errors of reasoning (Wood and Stewart 1987). But a study of 7th and 8th graders failed to find any similar effects (Bright et al 1983).
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