Tracking Training Performance in Mental Calculation

Anyone serious about improving a skill can benefit from keeping a note of their performance in training. For example, a competitive footballer could record their running speed in fitness training, their accuracy when practising free kicks, and some notes about their strategy and position during each match. A professional dancer may video some of their practices and comment on their progress.

For a skill like mental calculation, which is naturally very measurable, it is really easy to track your training performance. Many calculators keep a note of their top scores for different events, but there are many other statistics and thoughts that you can note that will be even more useful to you – check out the following list for some ideas:

Top 5 Performances

When you are very skilled at an event, it can be very difficult to beat your best score, especially when the best score was for a set of calculations that you found easier than normal. If you keep a record of your best 5 performances, you will be motivated to beat all of these 5 scores, not just your top score.

For example, if your top 5 scores on the official Memoriad software for Square Roots are 324, 308, 301, 301 and 296, you will be still be pleased if you get 307 next time you train.

 

Date of each new Personal Record

When you are improving fast, you beat your top score regularly. If you remember the date each time you set a new high score, you can see clearly when you are no longer improving and need a new training strategy. You can even plot a graph of your performance over time (for example using Excel) to see this visually. Here is a graph of my own personal progress over the last 4 years – you can see the 4 periods when I was training successfully.

 

Moving Averages

It’s easy to ignore bad performances in training, because we want to focus on the positive results. However, this can give us a distorted perception of our ability, and we will be disappointed after most competitions when we do worse than we expect.

A moving average is the average of your last (e.g. 10) results, and will show how your average performance changes over time. This is easy to do in Excel (e.g. “=AVERAGE(B4:B13)”). This also makes it very clear when your scores are no longer improving and you need to consider a different training strategy.

Here is a graph of my moving average for the last 100 trials of one of the training exercises I do. You can see the three periods where my scores improve, but also that I’ve only had a small improvement since trial #60.

 

Accuracy

For most events, it is very important to avoid mistakes. At any time you want to measure or improve your accuracy, keep a record of the number correct and incorrect, or the % correct, and check how this changes over time. For example, this is a training file with some data I collect from my own calendar dates training:

 

Specific mistakes

Often it can be frustrating to make mistakes without knowing how to improve. One useful technique is to do questions individually, and every time you make a mistake, recalculate carefully while you still remember what you did, and make a note of what the mistake was.

If you did this technique for calculating square roots, you might find that one time you used an incorrect value of 86-squared, but usually your mistake is in calculating the cross products with large numbers. This then tells you where you should concentrate to improve your accuracy.

 

Screenshots

Sometimes it’s nice to have proof of your best performances, either for sharing or for checking later whether the questions were easier than normal on that occasion and comparing to future performances.

 

Thoughts and Feelings

Training notes don’t have to be purely numerical. Keep a note of your feelings each time you train, and how your performance was in your own words. Some example entries that would be useful later are:

• Didn’t sleep well last night but had a coffee before training. Multiplication was slow and more mistakes than usual. Trained division instead and that was fine.
• Good training day although the construction work outside was very noisy. Calendar dates was good (reached 31 today again!) and addition was fine. Lots of mistakes in square roots though, maybe the noise was distracting.

 

Shorter-term goals

If you are a working on a small part of an event (e.g. calculating the initial remainder for square roots) you can make your own “event” and make notes of high scores for this. When you have improved as much as you want, you can see what positive impact this has had on the main event (e.g. square roots)

 

I’ve personally used most of these for training mental calculation, and similar techniques for gymnastics, weightlifting and athletics. Since it was helpful for me, I’m sure it can he helpful for you!

Have you used these note-taking methods, or do you have any others that have helped you? Let us know in the comments below!