The Efficiency of the Mind Lab method has been put to the test in a number of comparative research projects that were carried out in conjunction with senior researchers, most notably with Professor Donald Green of Yale University. The research verifies that the Mind Lab Method significantly improves the students' thinking abilities and life skills.

In one of these research projects the following assumption was tested: students can be taught abstract strategic thinking by learning meta-cognitive models and by being exposed to the applications of these models in thinking games and in real life situations. In order to test this assumption, a field test was conducted (in 2003) in which children between the ages 8-12, from diverse socio-economic backgrounds, took part.

• At the first stage, all the students were presented with the computerized version of the game "Rush Hour." This advanced version monitors the student's performance and progress and then collates it all into a database.
  
  
• At the second stage, the students in the research group were taught abstract models for problem solving, and their analogies to real life situations. Finally, they were shown how these models could be applied directly in the games. The students in the control group simply participated in free-game playing sessions.
  
  
• At the third stage, all the students were taught a new game "Lunar Lockout". Both groups received identical instruction.

The results show that the students in the research group significantly improved their performance levels in relation to their counterparts in the control group (even though the latter was allocated more time in their game playing sessions). The surprising fact is, that even in the third stage, the research group achieved much higher results. In actual fact, the disparity between the two groups tended to get bigger between stages two and three.

The conclusions drawn from these results are:

1. The learning of Mind Lab problem-solving models significantly improves the student's strategic thinking skills.
2. The students who learned Mind Lab abstract models succeeded in transferring the knowledge acquired to new fields, and the improvement in these new fields was even greater than in the original game.