Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In recent years, pupils’ poor achievement in mathematics has been a concern in many Western countries. Chessinstruction has been proposed as one way to remedy this state of affairs, as well as improving other academic topics and generalcognitive abilities. The aim of this paper is to quantitatively evaluate the available empirical evidence that skills acquired duringchess instruction in schools positively transfer to mathematics, reading, and general cognitive skills. The selection criteria weremet by 24 studies (40 effect sizes), with a total of 5,221 participants. The results show (a) a moderate overall effect size (g =0.34), and (b) a significant positive effect of duration of treatment (p < .05). However, almost no study controlled for placeboeffects by using an active control group. For this reason, there are still doubts about the real effectiveness of chess instruction –in spite of some promising results.