Saturday 5 December 14.00 – 15.00
An overview on the state of chess in schools in Europe and an update on some of the latest education Research.
Jesper Hall (Sweden)
Chairman, Education Commission European Chess Union
Jesper has been leading the first ECU survey on the status of chess in each chess Federation in Europe with particular reference to the status of chess in schools. He will update the conference on the interim findings.
ECU Education Presentation London 2015
Amanda Aldercotte (England)
Amanda is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. She is working on the INSTRUCT project, a multi-disciplinary research laboratory, incorporating cognitive developmental science with various educational disciplines, including science, mathematics, and literacy, led by Dr Michelle Ellefson. Amanda will present some the latest results from the project under the title “Thinking About Chess as a Mechanism for Executive Function Development”.
Playing chess simultaneously involves a number of different executive functions – for instance, players must be able to formulate a plan or strategy, inhibit their impulsive responses, delay gratification, shift from one strategy to another, and keep this information in mind. However, research demonstrating this intuitive association between executive functions and playing chess is limited in both its design and methodology. This talk will address these issues by exploring the concurrent and longitudinal relations between chess abilities and an array of executive functions using data from an after-school chess intervention program that has included two cohorts of children and five separate time points. The relevance of such relations in academic performance will be discussed alongside their practical application in educational policy.
Chess-Executive-Function-Development-Aldercotte
Giovanni Sala, UK
University of Liverpool
Giovanni Sala is a PhD Student of Fernand Gobet. He will present their jointly done new meta-analysis of studies on the effect of chess in schools.