What does chess improvement , neuroscience, Rolf Wetzell,
and Cornell Note taking methods having in common? For some reason I’ve been putting these
concepts in my blender-brain ( or should that be “blunderprone blender brain”) and
trying to make sense of it all as I prepare for training. I hope to tie these
all together in this post.
On Chess Improvement:
The discussions stemming from recent posts and connected
improvement seeking blogs all have the same goal in mind. They are all after
the same holy grail of figuring out how one improves their game at a later age
in life and get off the plateau. Some
have argued that we should just accept the fact that we are on a plateau and
just enjoy the game. Others, indicate you can’t get there without a coach, I believe
that is important as well. I am a bit of a rebel at heart only mellowed by life
experiences and lessons learned over the years. First, I believe that there is ALWAYS
opportunity to improve even as an adult. I don’t believe that neuro-plasticity
is just for kids. Secondly, I am a self starter, DIY person. I
want to first understand more my current limitations. Under self discovery, I’d
rather explore this personally so I can better understand the type of teacher I
seek before I spend money. I believe I am putting together a good base plan
with some input from supporters like you and elsewhere.
Before I describe what’s in my “buckets” and how I plan to
fill them , I wanted to share with you some
of the things I’ve been reading about
the learning process itself and how I plan to enrich my chess training with
some of these concepts. Among the many irons I have in the fire, being a part
time adjunct professor is one of them. I am also looking at ways to improve the
learning process especially to non-traditional students ( adults) seeking a career change. One thing that stands out is PASSIVE LEARNING
doesn’t work. The more engaged the student is in the material, the greater the
benefit. Project based learning is a much better model and I usually structure
my lectures as such. In chess, passively reading books, listening to lectures
without enough interaction, or mindlessly doing tactics without engaging myself
are “habits” I am recognizing that have contributed to my plateau. I plan to remedy this.
Deliberate Training and neuroscience:
I am not a neuroscientist nor do I claim to be an expert.
Let me just get that out of the way. I do not have the capability to provide an
in depth analysis on the subject. When
I read about this topic, I tend to put the content through a chess sieve. What I tend to focus on are topics around
working memory ( WM) and Motor Memory (MM). WM is what I relate to as the short term
static memory that we need to process more complex information. MM are the “chunks”,
patterns, or stumps we create as we develop skills towards an expertise in a
subject. This is the area I will focus more on this post.
I was really inspired by
Empirical Rabbit’s blog about his
approach to increasing pattern retention through use of deliberate training and
metered repetition ( see this post for example:
http://empiricalrabbit.blogspot.com/2011/03/bain-experiment.html
) He had several posts on applying this technique. Unclear about how this
impacted his OTB performance as he seems to have stopped blogging which may be because
of some understandable life events.
AoxomoxoA pointed me in the direction of an article by Gobet
and Campitelli on,
The Role of
Domain-Specific Practice, Handedness, and Starting age in Chess (
http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/retrieve/1078/license.txt
) . Which seemed to indicate that given the population of chess players, there
are more left handed players than the general population in a statistical
significance sort of way. However, there are arguments out there that say it
doesn’t matter what handedness you are to develop expert skills in chess. The “talent versus practice” debate still
seems to support practice can still achieve expertise in chess. A little further down this rabbit hole and
another article by this same team, lead me to
The Role of Practice in Chess: A Longitudinal Study (file:///C:/Users/George/Downloads/Campitelli-Gobet_LID08_TheRoleOfPracticeInChess-ALongitudinalStudy.pdf
). It is worth further exploration.
But here’s the thing,
I find that a lot of these scholarly articles are derivative of Thought and Choice in Chess, by Adriaan De Groot ( I have this
book) written 50 years ago. All of these
ideas seem to support deliberate repetitive training of what is
being learned are meant to be made into
chunks, patterns, stumps or what ever you want to call them in your MM. Neuroscience seems to underscore the key to
getting this into your long term memory for skills.
I like using the term
“Deliberate Practice” . Duvivier et
al. (
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6920/11/101)
reconstructed the concept of deliberate
practice into practical principles to describe the process as it relates to
clinical skill acquisition. They defined deliberate practice as:
- repetitive performance of intended cognitive or psychomotor
skills.
- rigorous skills assessment
- specific information feedback
- better skills performance
They further described the personal skills learners need to
exhibit at various stages of skill development in order to be successful in
developing their clinical skills. This includes:
- planning (organize work in a structured way).
- concentration/dedication (higher attention span)
- repetition/revision (strong tendency to practice)
- study style/self reflection (tendency to self-regulate
learning)
I realize this may be a lot to absorb in one post and this
is just scratching the surface. I
probably lost a few readers by now. So let me congratulate those hoard core enough
to soldier on. Let me now introduce the other related item in my blender:
Rolf Wetzell is a role model for an Adult Improver.
Rolf Wetzell wrote a
book, Chess Master…at any age, back in the 1990’s which described how he,
after the age of 50, went from a being stuck on a plateau between Class B and
Class A to becoming a USCF titled
master. He’s proof to me that old dogs can learn new tricks and a true
inspiration. I’ve picked his brain before because he used to frequent our local
chess club. He has a formulated approach to increasing chess skill and talks
about the “evaporation of memory” and how to minimize this. The heart of his
method is about increasing “images” which is basically an application on
deliberate practice. He describes a
method to develop flash cards that he used to quiz himself and even went as far
as ripping up dollar bills when he fell short of a goal or repeated a mistake.
I joked with him on how Spartan he was to do that. “ I’ve stopped ripping
dollars since I wrote that book.” There’s a lot of nuggets in this book about
applying the scientific method to improvement. I’m giving this a second read on
an upcoming long flight.
You probably read through this last paragraph and said to
yourself, “Wait, did he say FLASHCARDS?” I had the same reaction and thought
that creating a PGN database was MUCH better and proceeded to do as such with
various tools like COW ( Chess opening wizard) and simply ChessBase. In my
quest to create as many “images” as possible from what he prescribes in the
book (because I was always in a hurry), I was taking many shortcuts,
downloading other peoples work and importing to the database only occasionally adding
to the comments and annotating specific positions. In other words, I was
passively learning, which leads to my next topic in an already lengthy post:
The Cornell Note (CN) taking method:
No, I am not an Alumni of Cornell. I ran into this topic as
I was searching for learning techniques. I wish I knew this back in my college
days as it makes good sense. The basic
premise is that you make your own system of chunking the knowledge you are
learning by creating a stimulus (left
side o the paper) and response (right side of the page) set of
notes that you can later use to DRILL YOURSELF.
Whether CN is the best method or not, there are a lot of
articles that debate one versus the other shows more effectiveness. The Jury is
still out. All studies conclude that the act of good note taking improves the
learning and retention. I was then lead
to this article on Cognitive effort
during Note taking: (
http://sites.univ-provence.fr/~wpsycle/documentpdf/DocPiolat/Publications/POK2005%20ApplCogPSy.pdf
). So you don’t have to trudge through
this document, the key takeaway for me was that “the generation effect” of note
taking, that is, when you deliberate synthesize, paraphrase and rewrite what
you just read, sat through or listened to, is most effective in retention of
skills. I simply liked the CN method as
it sets up any chess studying I plan on doing to be ready for “drills”.
Conclusion of this long post:
Tying all this together, I am in the process of outlining a
training regimen which I will share on my next post. This will include deliberate
practice methods that I can do experimental repetitive, metered and measured
exercises tailored for specific “buckets” I need the most help with. I will reread Mr. Wetzell’s book but I want to explore using his note taking
methods to create hand written drills. I may later look and transposing those “flashcards”
to PGN viewer…but only after I have maximized “the generation effect”. This will be a fundamental shift of my
previous training where I will focus mainly on creating my own training
material with deliberate cognitive effort …this time.
Yes, I was that kid in school who asked for more homework.
Sorry.
