Literature Review (Meta-Analysis)

Literature Reviews: A Bird’s-Eye View of Multiple Studies

When you’re wading into a new topic, start by getting a view of the research as a whole. You do this by starting with a literature review, a bird’s-eye view of multiple studies that conveys the “state of the art” on a question of scholarly concern.

To answer whether chess makes you smarter, two psychologists at the University of Liverpool conducted a type of literature review known as meta-analysis, where the results of individual studies are aggregated across studies to estimate how successful (or negligible) a given intervention might be.

The researchers located sixty-four different studies but found that the vast majority, over 60 percent, contained so little information about the experimental procedures that they had to be eliminated from analysis. Combining the twenty-four remaining studies, the researchers found “small to moderate effects” of chess’s benefits on working memory, cognitive ability, and academic skill. However, the researchers’ conclusion came with this crucial caveat: the more rigorous the study, the smaller the effects. The researchers concluded that the chief benefit of playing chess is that it . . . makes you better at playing chess. There’s “little evidence,” they wrote, that the game “makes people smarter.”[8]