A child who learns an instrument gets better at the instrument, and a child who plays chess gets better at chess. The interesting question is whether the training also lifts skills nobody practiced at all, which is what researchers call . Three reviews pooled the experiments and sorted them by how well each one was built. What happened to the effect?
The effect shrank as the designs got stronger. Pooled together, chess, music and training showed small to moderate gains in cognitive and academic skills, and the size of the gain ran inversely to the quality of the experiment. Where the comparison group spent the same hours on some other activity instead of doing nothing, almost nothing was left. The training teaches what it trains.
Chess masters and expert musicians do score above average on cognitive tests. The tempting reading is that the training built the ability, and the other reading is that children who already think that way are the ones who stay with chess and with an instrument. Only an experiment can separate the two.
Sala and Gobet pooled the experiments into three , one for chess instruction, one for music instruction and one for working memory training, all measuring cognitive and academic outcomes. The first pass showed small to moderate gains, the kind of number that gets quoted in a school brochure.
Then they sorted the same studies by how well each was built, and the effect sizes ran inversely to design quality. The weakest experiments produced the largest gains, and the ones with an produced almost nothing. That pattern is the finding, more than any single number is.
This does not make music or chess a waste of a childhood, and it does not rule out far transfer in some program nobody has tested yet. It undoes one specific promise: that an hour of chess is a general shortcut to a better brain. Domestication of a skill stays close to the skill, and the hour is still worth spending for what the instrument or the board gives on its own.
wat. Set against a comparison group that spent the same hours on something else, the advantage of music and chess lessons in grades and general thinking nearly disappears.
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Music and chess are worth choosing for what they are, and not on a promise that they quietly raise every other ability along the way.
How do we know?
Sala and Gobet pooled the chess studies, the music studies and the working memory studies into three separate meta-analyses, then asked whether each effect depended on the kind of control group the experiment used.
What is still unknown
Three meta-analyses cannot rule out every far transfer at every age and in every program. They show that the best-built experiments support much less than the popular promise does.
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