[CALIBK12] chess and reading

[Stephen Krashen]

CHESS and READING

Randy de Jong posted this message:

"This is partly serious and tongue-in-cheek. Buy chess books and set up a chess area. My brother sent research to his administration about the positive correlation between chess and reading. They allowed him to teach his class chess as part of the curriculum. At the beginning of the year only 2 kids in his class were at grade level. After a quarter or semester. Chess became a reward for high quality work that was finished. Often 1/2 the class played chess while giving the others time to concentrate and finish. At the end of the year, all were at grade level or very close to it except two students that refused to do anything."



Randy's brother's experience is very interesting. I have been checking out the chess/reading connection.

An article in USA Today on Sept. 18 announced that second and third graders in Idaho are being exposed to chess as a means of improving their math and reading scores. The article did not mention any evidence that chess helps reading, and Idaho schools superintendent Tom Luna is quoted as saying that "there's little hard evidence students actually benefit from playing chess, and it could take a few years before Idaho can gauge whether students who learn chess are more successful in academics."

I was able to find only one study, published by the American Chess Foundation in New York, published in 1992:  The Effect of Chess on Reading Scores:  District Nine Chess Program Second Year Report, by Stuart Margulies Ph. D.  

53 children in the mid-elementary grades in District Nine in the Bronx, New York City (we are not told exactly what grades they were in) voluntarily participated in a chess program in 1990 and 1991. It is claimed that these students made better gains in reading over the year than comparison children, moving from the 57.69 percentile to the 63.07 percentile, a gain of 5.37 percentiles. Comparisons, we are told, showed no gain, but readers are invited to read about them, in District Nine Achievement Patterns, by E. Whitney, published in July, 1992.  

A look at the actual scores shows that six of the 53 children made unbelievable gains, ranging from 38 to 66 percentiles. If we remove these outliers, the difference between the groups is less than two NCE  ranks.  The case for chess in the published research, in other words, depends on unusual gains made by six children in one study done 15 years ago.

I wonder if the folks in Idaho have considered improving their school and classroom libraries as a means of improving reading?