Efecto de un curso de ajedrez en la atención y memoria de adolescentes de la Unidad Educativa Galo Plaza Lasso

Abstract

The general objective of this degree project was to evaluate the impact of a chess program taught in person on the attention and memory factors in adolescents aged 12 to 14 years of the "Galo Plaza Lasso" Educational Unit of San Fernando canton for a duration of two months. The population consisted of 40 school students; the type of study applied for this degree project was a quasi-experimental design focused on cases and control in which 24 students were in the control group and 16 in the experimental group. During the program, two tests associated with the study variables were used; The D2 test evaluates the attention in a time limit where the evaluated has to develop the speed of processing and following instructions, the Inverse Digits Subtest of the WISC-IV analyzes the memory more specifically the working memory since it has parameters to evaluate the sequencing and panning skills. The purpose of this project was to evaluate if the chess program improves the aforementioned factors, in order to use it as a didactic strategy to help the cognitive part of the student. At the end of this project, the results obtained were published, which when comparing the control group and the intervention group, an improvement in the level of attention and memory could be observed in the second group formed by students who actively participated in the chess course. Finally, it was concluded that cognitive and motor benefits are obtained with the constant practice of chess; such as a greater retention of information, improvement in decision making and also in the attention and memory factor