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Playing Games in Classroom Helping Pupils Grasp Math

Benefits for poor children seen to be particularly encouraging

Few family rituals have as fixed a place in the American household, and in the popular imagination, as board games, those impromptu or regularly scheduled contests played by parents and children on kitchen tables and living room floors.

Now, a growing body of research is revealing the potential benefits of using board games in the classroom to strengthen the mathematics skills of children, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

A new study offers one of the most detailed explorations of that topic yet. Published by a pair of scholars, it concludes that exposing youngsters from low-income backgrounds to a simple board game that involves counting produced large and lasting gains in...