Family game nights boost children's math skills, 20 years of studies suggest

A recent review of nearly 20 studies has found that number-based board games could help children's math skills. (Pexels)

Sitting down and playing numbers-based board games like chutes and ladders with your young children could help improve their skills in math, a recent review of nearly 20 studies over more than two decades suggests.

A study published on July 6 in the peer-reviewed journal Early Years looked at 19 studies from 2000 and on involving children between the ages of three and nine. All of the studies except one looked at the relationship between board games and math skills, the researchers said.

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Some of the games used in the studies included well-known ones such as dominoes, as well as chutes and ladders.

They found that these sorts of games helped children when it came to math skills such as counting and adding.

"Board games enhance mathematical abilities for young children," Jaime Balladares of Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile in Santiago, Chile, who served as the study's lead author, said in a news release.

"Using board games can be considered a strategy with potential effects on basic and complex math skills. Board games can easily be adapted to include learning objectives related to mathematical skills or other domains."

The researchers say since preschools rarely use board games, the study aimed to look at all of the available evidence on the effect that these games have on children.

"While board games can improve the understanding of knowledge, enhance interactions between players, and increase children's participation and motivation, there is limited evidence of scientific evaluations to estimate the magnitude of the effects of using games versus traditional teaching," the study says.

The researchers say all of the children who participated in the reviewed studies had, on average, board game sessions twice a week with an adult supervisor such as a teacher, therapist or parent that lasted 20 minutes over a month and a half.

Some studies had children play a numbers board game, while the rest played a game that did not focus on numbers. Other studies had all of the participants play different types of numbers-based board games.

The studies measured each child's math abilities before and after the sessions on skills such as naming numbers, determining if a number is greater than another one, and adding and subtracting.

Children's math skills improved "significantly" in 52 per cent of these tasks after a session, the researchers said, while 32 per cent of participants who played a numbers-based game had better results than those who did not take part in one.

"Future studies should be designed to explore the effects that these games could have on other cognitive and developmental skills," Balladares said.

"An interesting space for the development of intervention and assessment of board games should open up in the next few years, given the complexity of games and the need to design more and better games for educational purposes."