Stalemate? The complex relationship between educational chess and students’ skills

• We assess the impact of learning chess on a set of skills of 12-year-old students. • Our experimental design combines quantitative and qualitative analysis. • The effects of chess on cognitive and non-cognitive skills are null. • Students in the treated group show a better command of chess skills. • The intensity and timing of the intervention may explain the results. Over the last decade, an increasing number of countries have integrated chess as a pedagogical tool and even as core content of their academic curricula. Nonetheless, the evidence regarding the causal effects of chess on a range of skills remains inconclusive. We report new evidence of the impact of learning chess in school on a set of cognitive and non-cognitive skills of 12-year-old students to shed light on this matter. To do this, we take advantage of the implementation of a phase-in program introducing chess into a set of schools in Catalonia (Spain). This experimental setting enables us to estimate the causal effects of practicing educational chess at school on critical thinking, attention, patience, and risk aversion. Results show that, after one academic year, the differences between the treated and control group are not statistically significant for any of these outcomes. Students who took part in the chess program significantly outperformed the students in the control group only in terms of their chess-playing knowledge and proficiency.