In PARENTS MAGAZINE, the article titled, “The Brainy Benefits of Chess” by Beth Weinhouse opens up about 18 Kindergarden students learning chess on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in the DALTON SCHOOL (a private academy in New York City). Yes – Kindergarden – and for good reason – the chess game these kids are watching, sitting still and listening very closely to – is helping these future students develop a sense of discipline and exercising their concentration abilities.

In fact, it does make you smarter to learn chess and a growing body of research is showing that chess improves kids’ thinking and problem-solving skills as well as their math and reading test scores.  And as Beth Weinhouse points out, communities across the country are racing towards schools =who offer chess programs and who start chess clubs and who now provide chess into the official school curricula.

Still not yet convinced?

Schools that encourage chess are reacting to studies like:

1. New York City-based educational psychologist Stuart Margulies, Ph.D., who in 1996 found that elementary school students in Los Angeles and New York who played chess scored approximately 10 percentage points higher on reading tests than their peers who didn’t play.
2. James M. Liptrap, a teacher and chess sponsor at Klein High School in Spring, TX, conducted a similar study in 1997. He found that fifth-graders who played chess scored 4.3 points higher on state reading assessments and 6.4 points higher on math tests than their non-chess-playing peers.
3. Further proof comes from the doctoral dissertation of Robert Ferguson, executive director of the American Chess School in Bradford, PA. He studied junior high students, each of whom was enrolled in an activity — either working with computers, playing chess, taking a creative writing workshop, or playing Dungeons and Dragons — that was designed to develop critical and creative thinking skills. By the time the students had spent about 60 hours on their chosen activities, the chess players were well ahead of the others in several psychological tests, scoring almost 13 percentage points higher in critical thinking and 35 percentage points higher in creative thinking.
4. Experts attribute chess players’ higher scores to the rigorous workout chess gives the brain. Studies by Dianne Horgan, Ph.D., dean of the graduate school of counseling, educational psychology, and research at the University of Memphis, has found that chess improves a child’s visual memory, attention span, and spatial-reasoning ability. And because it requires players to make a series of decisions, each move helps kids learn to plan ahead, evaluate alternatives, and use logic to make sound choices.

One thing is for certain, in my many years in teaching chess I’ve found that chess has helped all students. Whether they have issues with attention or are easily distracted, dyslexic, bilingual, gifted, shy and closed-off; I’ve had the opportunity to see them all absorb the strategies and gain a strong level of confidence when they use them to win.  For myself its the most rewarding thing to see a child overcome what they thought was their own personal limitation and push past it to gain power over it to achieve their personal best.