In October of 2008 America's Foundation for Chess commissioned Northwest Education Labs to conduct a research study on the effects and benefits of First Move in the classroom.

Highlights from the report 

Most students (83.6%) indicated that learning chess made them "feel smarter."About 64.2% said that learning chess helped them "think better in reading and math."

"Ten out of 12 students said they did not know how to play chess before taking the class. Currently all knew how to play chess, and most rated themselves as “a good chess player.”...They learned new terms such as “scrutinize,” “strategies,” “coordinates,” “ranks,” and “files,” which they could use in reading and math. All students thought that chess helped them “think better”..."

In parent surveys, 91.3% of responding parents believed that all children should learn chess in elementary school.

Read the full report below:

Northwest Education Labs Research Report

Additional Chess Research

In 2003, America’s Foundation for Chess conducted a comprehensive survey of the world’s scientific literature and identified numerous research studies confirming the benefits of chess instruction on students’ academic performance, especially math and reading.  The research concludes that there is a positive effect from chess on intellectual achievement. Here are a few…
 
Celone (2001) “Chess significantly increased student scores in non-verbal intelligence, which reflected increased abilities in abstract reasoning and problem solving.”
 
Smith and Sullivan (1997) “Chess education has a substantial positive effect on analytical thinking skills which are important in math, engineering and the physical sciences.  The impact was particularly strong among girls.”
 
Liptrap (1997).  “Students receiving chess instruction scored significantly higher in standardized tests of both math and reading.”

Rifner (1992) “Problem solving skills that chess teaches will transfer to tasks in other academic domains, including reading comprehension and math, and to enhanced performance on standardized tests of academic achievement.”
 
Van Zyl (1991)  “Chess nourishes latent learning abilities, and reinforces skills in logical and abstract thinking, impulse control, endurance and determination.  This was manifest as a significant improvement in both verbal and non-verbal IQ scores after three years of chess instruction.”