Abstract
We analyse the effect of substituting a weekly mathematics lesson in primary school grades 1–3 with a lesson in mathematics based on chess instruction. We use data from the City of Aarhus in Denmark, combining test score data with a comprehensive data set obtained from administrative registers. We use two different methodological approaches to identify and estimate treatment effects and we tend to find positive effects, indicating that knowledge acquired through chess play can be transferred to the domain of mathematics. We also find larger impacts for unhappy children and children who are bored in school, perhaps because chess instruction facilitates learning by providing an alternative approach to mathematics for these children. The results are encouraging and suggest that chess may be an important and effective tool for improving mathematical capacity in young students.
Highlights
The costs of primary and lower secondary schooling in Denmark are among the highest in OECD. This is in part due to large amounts being spent on children in special needs education; about one third of all the costs of primary and lower secondary education goes to special needs education, aimed at both students with learning disabilities and students with behavioural problems
We investigate whether chess instruction leads to improvements in math test scores of primary school children in Denmark relative to a comparison group receiving ordinary math lectures
On average, replacing one weekly math lecture with instruction based on chess learning material, during almost three quarters of a school year in grades 1–3 in primary school, leads to an improvement in subsequent math test scores of around 0.10– 0.18 standard deviations
Summary
The costs of primary and lower secondary schooling in Denmark are among the highest in OECD. Focus has recently switched towards non-cognitive factors when seeking explanations for educational failure. Factors such as emotions, personality, behavioural problems and lack of self-control are increasingly brought forth as explanations [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. A recent longitudinal study [12] is of particular interest in this regard They examined data from 4.600 middle-school students from 24 different schools and found that, prior grades and standardized achievement were the strongest predictors of high school grade point average (GPA), psychosocial and behavioural factors
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