There are many pedagogical benefits attributed to board games both when it comes to developing cognitive, affective, social and psychomotor skills. And they have also been known for a long time to facilitate learning and the development of skills such as reading or vocabulary. But there isn’t much scientific research exploring the effects that an intervention with certain games has on specific cognitive abilities.
Now, a new study published today in Early Years magazine conducting a comprehensive review of published research on the subject over the past 23 years claims that number-based board games like Monopoly, Othello, and Chutes and Ladders ladders) make young children better at math.
Specifically, the study ensures that playing board games based on numbers several times a week helps children between the ages of 3 and 9 to improve their ability to count, add and understand mathematics, that is, to recognize if one number is higher or lower than another.
The researchers say that children benefit from programs or interventions in which they play these games several times a week, supervised by a teacher or other adult, because they improve their math skills relative to other children of the same age who do not do this. activity.
The authors base their findings on a review of 19 studies published since 2000 involving children ages three to nine, all but one of which focused on the relationship between board games and math skills.
In all of them, the children received special sessions of board games of 20 minutes an average of two times a week and for a month and a half. Sessions were led by teachers, therapists or parents, and in some of the 19 studies children were divided between a numbers board game and a non-numeracy game, while in other papers numbers games were used. table of numbers but of different types, such as dominoes.
And all the children were tested on their math performance before and after the intervention sessions, which were designed to encourage skills like counting aloud. The results showed that the skills improved significantly after the sessions in more than half of the tasks analyzed, and in a third of the cases the children of the intervention groups obtained better results than those who did not participate in them.
The authors consider these programs successful in building skills in four categories: basic numeracy (i.e., the ability to name numbers), basic number comprehension (for example, nine is greater than three), comprehension numerical (allowing for accurate addition and subtraction) and interest in mathematics.
“Board games improve young children’s math skills and can be considered a strategy with effects on basic and complex math skills,” said Jaime Balladares, lead author of the study and professor of psychology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, in a statement. presenting their conclusions.
Balladares believes that board games can be a very useful educational tool because “they can be easily adapted to include learning objectives related to math skills or other domains.”
For this reason, he considers that “a space should be opened for the development of intervention and evaluation of board games and also for designing more and better games for educational purposes”. All this, maintains the researcher, based on scientific procedures and studies “that explore the effects that these games can have on cognitive and developmental abilities.”
