Connections Academy – Dan Reiner
With National Chess Day being celebrated this Saturday, October 12, it’s a great time to dust off the board or log on for an online chess game. Need some encouragement? Here are five reasons your student should be playing this 1,500-year-old game of strategy and logic.
Playing chess . . .
- Improves concentration and memory. According to studies done at the University of Memphis, playing chess significantly improves children’s visual memory, attention span, and spatial-reasoning ability. Perhaps that’s because, in chess as in school, concentration and memory go hand in hand.
In order to play well, you have to focus completely on your objective—capturing the opponent’s king. As you constantly visualize the board, its pieces, your moves, and your opponent’s every possible countermove, your power of concentration grows. As your concentration grows, it becomes easier to memorize past games and classic strategies. In the process, both concentration and memory grow stronger in a kind of mutually reinforcing “dance.”
- Enhances reading and math skills. With its focus on problem solving and move variables, it’s not surprising that chess can improve a student’s math skills. But numerous studies show that chess improves reading skills as well!
In separate multi-year studies of elementary-school-age children in Texas, Los Angeles, New York, Pennsylvania, and Canada, researchers found that students who played chess showed more improvement in reading and/or math assessment scores than their non-chess-playing peers. A Venezuelan study even found that playing chess increased students’ IQs!
Why does chess improve reading skills? One researcher, educational psychologist Dr. Stuart Marguilies, suggests that it’s because the cognitive processes for both are similar—requiring decoding, thinking, comprehension, and analysis.
by MindMake via MindMake Blog
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