Observational learning

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of task constraint in learning football chip through observation. For this purpose, 20 children (mean age of 11.6±1.7) participated in this study and were randomly divided into two groups (10 individuals). At the acquisition stage, one group watched the model and they were told nothing about kicking the ball, while the other group was told that the task is to kick a ball that should land on a specified target. At the acquisition stage, participants performed 30 attempts (three blocks of ten attempts each) which before the first attempt, they watched the model's film five times, and again, after each attempt they watched the film. After 24 hours, participants were again called to the lab and performed ten attempts as a reminder. The kinematic movement of the participants was recorded in order to compare it with the model. The results showed that the non-ball group had a more similarity to the model than the group with the ball. However, these results showed that in the speed variable, the movement of the group with the ball is more similar to the model. These results were explained in terms of goal-directed imitation theory as well as the existence of an external goal in the task.

Background: The authors assessed the effect of bandwidth modeling in learning relative timing and absolute timing. Method: Participants were 10 male high school students who volunteered to participate in the experiment (M age = 16 years, SD = 0.942 years). None of the participants had prior experience with the task or was informed about the purpose of the experiment. They had to learn soccer chip shot under either a bandwidth (model delivered when participant’s performance was outside a predefined bandwidth or rang) or yoked (same number of model provided as bandwidth group) modeling procedure. Results: The results show that the bandwidth group was more effective in learning relative timing than the yoked group. Conclusions: It indicated that benefits of feedback frequency reduction is generalizable to observational learning context. The authors propose that this method may be an appropriate method for relative timing learning.

Promotional gift is one of the tools to promote non-monetary sales that has various dimensions and these dimensions can affect the attitude of customers and ultimately their intention to buy. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of promotional gifts on customer attitude and observational learning. The statistical population of the study is all customers of Ofogh Kourosh store branches in Birjand. The size of the community in this study is unlimited. The number of samples using Morgan table is 384 people that questionnaire was distributed among the sample by available sampling method. This research is a descriptive, descriptive-causal research in terms of nature and method and an applied research in terms of purpose. To collect the data, standard questionnaires of promotional gifts of Zhu et al. (2015), observational learning of Khawaja (2013), and customer attitude of Stafford (1996) were used. The reliability of the questionnaires in this study is 0.885, 0.894 and 0.743, respectively. Descriptive indicators and structural equation modeling were used to analyze the data with the help of SPSS and PLS software. The results of data analysis showed that promotional gifts have a significant effect on customer attitude (with a path coefficient of 0.694) and on observational learning (with a path coefficient of 0.790).

Background: Observational learning is an effective pedagogical approach that can be used as a method to improve motor skill acquisition and also a useful instrument to promote psychological variables such as self-efficacy by emphasizing the motivational aspect. Although, little research is known about the model type and the observation conditions which will optimize learning. Aim: This study aimed to clarify the effect of using a combination of ideal model-observation and self-observation on self-efficacy and learning the forehand service of table tennis. Materials and Methods: Forty females were assigned to one of four experimental groups. All groups received the same instructions concerning how to perform the task, filled out a self-efficacy questionnaire, and then performed 10 pre-test trials. The acquisition phase included six sessions. The retention test was done 72 hours after the last acquisition session. Mixed ANOVA with repeated measures and Bonferroni post hoc tests were conducted, and one-way ANOVA was used to determine group significant differences. Results: The results indicated that observing the combination of skilled and learning models led to the highest self-efficacy for learning, compare with other experimental models. Also, significant learning of the task was shown in the acquisition phase in which the performance of all three experimental groups was clearly superior to the control group. Although in this phase there was no significant difference between the performances of two groups of combined skilled-learning and skilled. The results of the delayed retention test indicated that the performance scores of the combined skilled-learning group were significantly higher than the other three groups. Also, in this phase, the difference between the combined skilled self-observation and control or skilled groups was not significant. Conclusion: Demonstrating a skilled model is the most popular type of observational learning among the instructors and physical education teachers, it is suggested that adding a learning model to that leads to better performance and enhancing the self-efficacy.