Learning chess is highly efficient for children because:

• Chess helps children make friends more easily because it provides an easy, safe forum for gathering and discussion;
• Chess allows girls to compete with boys on a non-threatening, socially acceptable plane;
• Chess accommodates all modality strengths.
• Chess provides a far greater quantity of problems for practice.
• Chess offers immediate punishments and rewards for problem solving.
• Chess creates a pattern or thinking system that, when used faithfully, breeds success.
• Competition. Competition fosters interest, promotes mental alertness, challenges all students, and elicits the highest levels of achievement. A learning environment organized around games has a positive effect on student’s attitudes toward learning. This affective dimension acts as a facilitator of cognitive achievement. Instructional gaming is one of the most motivational tools in the good teacher’s repertoire.
• Children love games. Chess motivates them to become willing problem solvers and spend hours quietly immersed in logical thinking. These same young people often cannot sit still for fifteen minutes in the traditional classroom. 

CHESS IMPROVES ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE

An experiment with chess indicated that after only 20 days of instruction, students’ academic performance improved dramatically students showed significant improvement in academic performance after this brief smattering of chess instruction.

A Robert Ferguson study showed that test scores improved 17.3% for students regularly engaged in chess classes, compared with only 4.6% for children participating in other forms of “enrichment activities” including Future Problem Solving, Dungeons and Dragons, Problem Solving with Computers, independent study, and creative writing. He concluded that chess improves critical thinking skills more than the other methods of enrichment. Not only have the reading and math skills of these children soared, their ability to socialize has increased substantially, too. Many studies have shown that incidents of suspension and outside altercations have decreased by at least 60% since these children became interested in chess.

Latest scientific studies give us substantial evidence for what chess coaches have suspected for a long time: chess can improve our reading skills. One comparative study for example, took place among children in an elementary school divided into two groups:  (1) pupils who didn’t play chess and (2) pupils who continuously played during the course of one year. At the end of the year the abilities of the first group turned out to be unchanged, while the IQ, self-control, analytical abilities and concentration of the second group increased. This being the outcome, the improvement of the second group’s reading skills was self-
evident.

WHAT DO EDUCATORS SAY?