Análise do impacto do xadrez sobre o quociente de inteligência em crianças de 8 a 10 anos

Abstract

The conception that the teaching-learning process of chess is related to improvement of academic performance of students has stimulated research projects in several countries over the past two decades. In recent years, chess and musical instruction and working memory training have been claimed to be capable of training general domain skills (for example, fluid reasoning/intelligence) which, in turn, generalize to other cognitive and academic skills (for example mathematics). Thus, the objective of this work is to verify the impact of chess on the cognitive skills of children of 8 and 10 years, from the 3rd and 5th year, using the “Wechsler for children - Fourth Edition” intelligence scale. Originally designed with 90 students, after exclusions, 45 students participated in this study. Students were randomly divided into three groups: “Group – Chess”, “Control Group I – Games” and “Control group II - No stimulus”. The “Group – Chess” received an intervention of 34 hours of chess classes, the “Control Group I – Games” received an intervention of 34 hours of games, with ludo, checkers, naval battles, reversi and backgammon and the control group received no intervention. Our research was based on the “ideal experiment” method (Gobet and Campitelli, 2006), which proposes specific careful control measures, regarding random organization of the participants, inclusion of pretest and post-test, two control groups, being only one without stimulation, different teachers and applicators and the subjects' lack of knowledge about the experiment. Results showed that there was no general average evolution in the Total IQ in the Group - Chess and Control Group I – Games. However, when the subtests were analyzed individually, some significant positive differences were pointed out: the “Group – Chess” showed significant results only in the “Cancellation” and “Codes” subtests and “Control Group” – Games” in the “Codes”, “Cancellation” and “Cubes” subtests, partially confirming our hypotheses. “The Group – Chess” showed significant results, superior to the “Control Group II - Without stimulus”, in the “IOP index” and in the “Matrix Reasoning” subtests in the Two-way analysis - U of Mann-Whitney; Cohen's d, also, in favor of our hypotheses. “The Group – Chess” presented significant results superior to the Control Group I - Games in: “IVP index” in the Three-Way-ANOVA analysis and in the “IOP” and “IVP” indices in the Two-way analysis – U of Mann-Whitney; Cohen's d, supporting our hypotheses; in the subtests of “Figurative Concepts” and “Searching for Symbols” in the Three-Way-ANOVA analysis and in the subtests of “Figurative Concepts”, “Arithmetic”, “Completing Figures”, “Similarities, Information”, “Searching for Symbols” and “Matrix Reasoning” in Mann-Whitney's Two-way analysis, somewhat corroborating our hypotheses; Cohen's d. Although, the study had some limitations (interference from teachers in the release of students in the post-test, time-window between intervention and application of the post-test and reapplication with different applicators, and, especially, the covid-19 pandemic serious drawbacks) the “ideal experiment”, with our improvements, presented itself as a strong methodological instrument and the results confirmed several initial hypotheses that chess can contribute to the development of cognitive skills.