The effects of early childhood chess education on elementary school readiness of children

In Turkey, early childhood education institutions offer several activities like swimming, dancing, drama and chess besides the activities that are required by the preschool education curriculum. But how do these activities affect early childhood development and children's further education? This study aims to examine the effects of early childhood chess education activities on children's school readiness. Levels the study group of the research is composed of 60 children in total, 30 of whom receive chess education and 30 of whom do not. The children enrolled in chess classes are at the age of five-six and selected through random selection from Ankara's independent preschools under the Ministry of National Education. Within the scope of this research, Metropolitan Readiness Test was used in order to measure the school readiness of preschool children; B form of PKBS Preschool and Kindergarten Behavior Scales was applied in order to assess preschoolers' social skills; (FTF-K) Attention Test for Five-Year-Old Children was administered to determine concentration skills. Pretests and post-tests were applied to both experimental and control groups to find out whether there was any significant difference between the children's skills. Study results revealed that early childhood chess lessons had a significant effect on school readiness, social and concentration skills. However, while there was no significant difference with respect to the early childhood chess education's effects on two subtests (word recognition and general knowledge) of the Metropolitan Readiness Test, significant differences were found for other subtests like sentences, numbers, matching and copying skills. KEY WORDS: Early childhood, Chess education, Elementary school readiness.