Child’s Memory

To play chess well requires intense concentration.  Some of the world’s top players can undeniably look distracted, sometimes jumping up between moves to walk around.  A closer look, however, reveals that most of these players are actually in deep concentration, relying on strong visual recall to plan and calculate even when they are away from their game.  For young, inexperienced players, chess teaches the rewards of concentration as well as provides immediate penalties for lapses.  Few teaching tools provide such quick feedback.  One slip in concentration can lead to a simple blunder, perhaps even ending the game.  Only a focused, patient and persistent young chess player will maintain steady results – characteristics that are equally valuable for performing well at school, especially in school exams. Playing chess well involves a combination of aptitudes.  A 1973-74 study in Zaire by Dr Albert Frank (1974) found that good teenage chess players (16-18 years old) had strong spatial, numerical, administrative-directional, and paperwork abilities.  Dr Robert Ferguson (1995) notes that “This finding tends to show that ability in chess is not due to the presence in an individual of only one or two abilities but that a large number of aptitudes all work together in chess.”  Even more significantly Frank’s study found that learning chess, even as teenagers, strengthened both numerical and verbal aptitudes.  This occurred for the majority of students (not just the strong players) who took a chess course for two hours each week for one school year.  Other studies have added that playing chess can strengthen a child’s memory (Artise).