The Effects of Chess Instruction on Academic and Non-cognitive Outcomes: Field Experimental Evidence from a Developing Country

Highlights

• We investigate the benefits of an intensive chess training program.

• Chess training reduces the level of risk aversion.

• It improves math scores and reduces the incidence of time inconsistency.

• No evidence of significant effects on other academic and non-academic outcomes.

Abstract

We conduct a randomized field experiment to investigate the benefits of an intensive chess training program undertaken by primary school students in a developing country context. We examine the effects on academic outcomes, and a number of non-cognitive outcomes: risk preferences, patience, creativity and attention/focus. Our main finding is that chess training reduces the level of risk aversion almost a year after the intervention ended. We also find that chess training improves math scores, reduces the incidence of time inconsistency and the incidence of non-monotonic time preferences. However, these (non-risk preference) results are less conclusive once we account for multiple hypothesis testing. We do not find any evidence of significant effects of chess training on other academic outcomes, creativity, and attention/focus.

Introduction

Chess is a popular game played by millions worldwide. Its popularity is at least in part attributable to its perceived effect on cognitive skills in general, and math ability in particular. In recent years, chess coaching for children has become increasingly popular in developed countries.¹ The European Parliament has expressed a favorable opinion on using chess courses in schools as an educational tool (Binev et al., 2011). In 2014, School Library Journal’s best education pick of the year was a chess-related product called Yamie Chess, which is backed by Harvard and MIT academics.² The benefits of playing chess regularly have been suggested in a documentary that focuses on an inner-city school in New York, and two European countries – Armenia and Poland – have even made chess instruction compulsory in their primary-school curricula.³ More recently, the city of Bremen in Germany has decided to introduce 1 ​h of chess per week as a subject in primary schools in 2020, an issue covered widely in the German press.⁴

Parents and teachers generally view chess as a highly regarded extracurricular activity in primary school.⁵ However, to date, there is hardly any study rigorously examining the effects of chess instruction. An exception is Jerrim et al. (2018), who report results from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) conducted in the UK to evaluate the impact of teaching children chess on academic outcomes. Contrary to popular belief, they found no evidence that teaching children chess improved their math ability. There were also no impacts on reading and science.

In this paper, we conduct an RCT to examine the effects of intensive chess lessons among grade five students in a developing country. We follow the curriculum approved by the World Chess Federation. We differ from Jerrim et al. (2018) and the literature on the impact of chess training on two counts. First, we study the link between chess and non-cognitive outcomes such as risk preferences, patience, creativity, attention and focus. Second, we examine the effects of chess learning in a developing country context. Children in our experiment come from rural primary schools in Bangladesh who do not have previous experience playing chess. Our setting is particularly well-suited to test the benefits of a chess training program because unlike children in urban areas in a developed country, most children in rural areas in a developing country will never have been exposed to the game of chess before, much less any other cognitively demanding games.⁶

We first examine the effects of chess training on test scores. Our primary outcomes for test scores come from a standardized, compulsory public exam that all fifth-grade students in Bangladesh must take – the Primary School Certificate (PSC) exam – which took place 9–10 months after the completion of chess training. While we are particularly interested in examining the effects on math test scores because of the perceived math benefits from playing chess, we also examine the results for students’ first language and science.⁷

Chess is often regarded as a game reflecting real life (Franklin, 1786) and teaching children how to play chess in a prescribed systematic fashion might also help in their development of important non-cognitive outcomes. Therefore, we pay special attention to the collection of extensive data on non-cognitive outcomes to examine the effects of chess training. In particular, we measure risk preferences, patience, creativity and attention/focus.

Chess, through the formation of strategies, can be useful for the conceptualization and calculation of risks.⁸ For example, chess players often sacrifice pawns, bishops, knights, rooks, or queens if it helps checkmate the opponent’s king and win the game. Such sacrifices are inherently risky because if one’s calculations are faulty, the sacrifice could prove to be fatal, eventually leading to a quick loss of the game. Gambits and sacrifices can be made during any of the three phases of a chess game – opening, middlegame, or endgame. Such an association between risk taking and chess playing is, for example, utilized to study the link between risk preferences and attractiveness (Dreber et al., 2013) through behavior in chess.⁹ Chess playing styles have also been used as a proxy for differences in risk appetites across civilisations (Chassy and Gobet, 2015). Thus, learning how to play chess and gaining an appreciation of basic chess strategy can help in the development and articulation of risk preferences in children.

The role of risk in chess can be seen in how computer chess software function. Computers are now better at chess than even the world’s strongest grandmasters, and we can learn more about how the game is optimally played from studying their games and using them for analysis.¹⁰ When a computer plays chess, there is no element of psychology involved. The computer never gets tired and does not care who it is playing. There is, however, a setting available in many commercial chess programs that allow one to set the “risk level” in the software. This setting changes the style of play of the computer opponent, who might play in a more risky style (i.e. have a higher tendency to sacrifice and attack) or in a less risky style (i.e. have a tendency to focus on longer term strategic objectives). A risky style leads to more wins and losses, with fewer drawn games, whereas a less risky style will lead to relatively more drawn chess games, and fewer wins and losses. It has some similarities to conservative and risky styles in investing, which is why there is anecdotal evidence that many firms in the financial industry view a competitive chess background as a positive factor when hiring.

The chess syllabus used for our experiment (see Online Appendix 1 in the paper) includes coverage of risk related concepts such as using risky openings (the Scholar’s mate, otherwise known as the four-move checkmate) and making sacrifices. Going for checkmate early in the game by moving one’s queen out early is considered to be a risky strategy because if it does not work, it can backfire and lead to a disadvantage in one’s position (e.g. other pieces are undeveloped). However, sacrificing can be an optimal strategy when one is already in a lost position. As there is nothing to lose, one can risk everything to try to checkmate the opponent. Of course, being able to calculate and appreciate risks may either increase or decrease risk aversion: the risk hypothesis we test is therefore two-sided.

Furthermore, chess might help teach children to be more patient, more focused, and have more self-control.¹¹ It can potentially motivate children to become willing problem-solvers, able to spend hours quietly immersed in logical thinking. Chess can also be a useful tool to teach the importance of forward-looking behavior. An important element in chess is the evaluation process, i.e., one needs to look a few steps ahead during a chess game and consider and evaluate alternative scenarios. Chess can teach children how to focus and visualize by imagining a sequence of events before it happens. The schematic thinking approach in chess resembles trees and branches in sequential-decision analysis and might also be useful and possibly transferable to math skills, as has been emphasized previously (Scholz et al., 2008; Trinchero and Sala, 2016).

In addition to children’s risk preferences and time preferences, we also investigate whether undertaking intensive chess lessons can affect children’s creativity and attention/focus. Although there is some debate over whether creativity is an aspect of intelligence or a personality trait, several studies have shown that creativity can be experimentally manipulated (see Runco and Sakamoto, 1999, for a review). The ability to focus on a task at hand is also a useful non-cognitive outcome that chess might be able to nurture. Attention is considered to be a major part of working memory, responsible for the control of flow of information, switching between tasks and selection of relevant stimuli and inhibition of irrelevant ones (Travis, 1998). The study of the development of attention occupies a central place in cognitive developmental psychology, and we use frequently used tests for focus/attention in our evaluation.

This paper is relevant to several sub-fields of economics. First, there has been much recent interest in the development of non-cognitive skills in children and their importance in later life outcomes in the economics literature. Non-cognitive skills have been shown to be very important for a host of outcomes, including schooling, social behaviors, drugs, smoking, truancy, teenage pregnancy, involvement in crime, and labor market success (Heckman et al., 2006; Carneiro et al., 2007). In addition, although a large literature in experimental economics has focused on the role of risk preferences in explaining life outcomes (e.g. Dohmen et al., 2011; Sutter et al., 2013), surprisingly little is known about differences in risk preferences at an early age and how these preferences are developed, or how they may alter the life paths of students (Andreoni et al., 2019a). Chess may be of particular interest to policymakers who are interested in identifying programs that can provide early stimulation and help develop such important “soft” life skills in children during their formative years. Second, in the program evaluation literature, there is increasing interest in evaluating interventions that have the potential to be scaled up (Banerjee et al., 2017). Given resource and institutional constraints, the effectiveness of scalable interventions that can be deployed which can form the basis of public policy is to date not well explored. As introducing chess as a subject in school will not be very costly, the educational intervention we examine in this paper most certainly has the potential to be scaled up if smaller proof-of-concept studies such as this paper show positive results. Indeed, some countries like Armenia and Poland and cities like Bremen in Germany have already made the decision to scale up despite scant rigorous experimental evidence on the effects of chess instruction. Furthermore, neighbouring India is making progress in introducing chess to the school curriculum. India currently has about 17 million children involved nationwide, especially in the states of Gujarat and Tamil Nadu where chess is part of the curriculum.¹² There is a possibility that chess will be introduced to schools around the country.¹³ So far, largely due to the continuing efforts of the All India Chess Federation (AICF), over 1000 schools in the Delhi region in India have already adopted chess as a sport in the past few years.¹⁴

Overall, the main finding in our paper is that chess training has a significant effect on reducing the level of risk aversion almost a year later. Based on conventional p-values and wild bootstrap p-values, we also find that chess training has a positive impact on math scores in the national exam and reduces the incidence of both time inconsistency and non-monotonic time preferences. However, the results are less conclusive once we account for multiple hypothesis testing using the false discovery rate (FDR). Effects of chess training on the other academic outcomes, creativity, and attention/focus were not statistically significant.

The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 briefly discusses how chess can translate to learning outcomes. Section 3 provides information on the intervention. Section 4 describes the data and the academic and non-cognitive outcomes measured in this study. Section 5 presents the results of the intervention. Section 6 concludes.