Does chess make children smarter? What the research says

The forwarded message reaches most parent WhatsApp groups sooner or later. Chess raises IQ. Children who play chess score higher in maths. A country added chess to its national curriculum and saw grades jump.

I teach chess to children. Those messages would sell my classes for me. I still won’t repeat them, because the best evidence says they are wrong.

What the big studies found

In 2016 two researchers, Giovanni Sala and Fernand Gobet, pulled together 24 studies of chess in schools, covering 5,221 children. On the surface the result looked good for chess: a moderate positive effect on maths and thinking skills.

Then they looked at how the studies were run. Almost none compared chess players with children doing some other new activity. Most compared chess against nothing. Any new, interesting class with an enthusiastic adult tends to lift children for a while, so the chess effect and the “something new happened” effect were mixed together.

A year later the same researchers went further. Across the studies, the stronger the design, the smaller the benefit of chess. Their verdict was blunt: they doubt chess training improves general thinking or school results.

The cleanest test came from England. The Education Endowment Foundation ran a randomised trial with 100 schools and 4,009 pupils in Year 5. One group of schools got a year of chess lessons, and the other carried on as normal. A year later the researchers checked national test scores in maths, reading and science.

They found no evidence chess made a difference.

Chess makes children better at chess. The jump from chess to exam marks is the part the evidence doesn’t support.

Where this leaves your money

This reaches beyond chess. If the most studied “brain game” for children fails the hard test, how many other products sold to you as making your child smarter have faced a test at all? The apps, the brain-training puzzles, the music classes with a maths promise attached.

You don’t need to feel foolish about any of them. The promises are made for you on purpose, and almost nobody checks.

I don’t sell chess as a shortcut to better marks. I sell it for things you see with your own eyes, at your own table.

What chess does reliably

Chess rewards habits a child practises every game, and you watch them grow.

• Writing things down. Children learn notation, a way to record every move, and a child who records a game reads it back to you later.
• Reviewing a loss. After a lost game we replay it and find the move where it turned, and children get used to looking at their own mistakes without falling apart.
• Staying with a hard puzzle for ten minutes instead of guessing.
• Losing in front of the group, then turning up next week to play again.

Look at the position below. White to move and win at once.

Children call this the back-rank mate. Once they see it, they spot it in their own games within days, and then start guarding against it. The skill is narrow: look for checks, look at what the king’s own pieces block. It’s also real, and you watch your child use it.

Check the research yourself

Don’t trust my summary any more than you trust the forwarded message. The links below go to the studies. A few things to look for as you read:

• How many children were in the study?
• Did the comparison group do another activity, or nothing?
• Who ran the study, and who paid for it?
• Did the researchers check results months later, or the same week?

Sala and Gobet’s 2016 review also found longer programmes, over 25 hours, showed bigger effects. Their later work still found the effect shrinking when the design got stronger. Two careful readers will weigh those points differently. Read them and form your own view.

Then test what matters to you. Ask any chess teacher, including me: what will my child do after a term which they don’t do today? If the answer is a promise about exam marks, ask for the evidence.

My answer: your child will write down a game, replay it for you and point at the move where it went wrong.