Imagine learning how to do everything that you know today by reading it from a book or listening to someone describe it. You would have to continuously reread passages and play back voices and ultimately take way too much time trying to do simple tasks like brush your teeth or play a sport. Luckily, we don’t have to go through difficult procedures to learn most common tasks because we use observational learning. Observational learning is learning how to do something by watching, remembering, and repeating a new action.
In class we learned about observational learning in the form of a bobo doll. Children would learn and copy what they had seen with the bobo doll, which was to hit, kick, and throw the doll all around. Even if they were not violent kids to begin with, they would copy the behavior of the people that they saw interact with it before them. This shows how powerful observational learning can be because it can influence people to act in certain ways based on only the knowledge of what they have seen previously.
When I was a child I had to use observational learning to figure out how to ride a bike, and it was the best way that I could’ve learned how to do it. Since I was little, there was no way I could have been able to learn the motion of how to move my legs and the pedals without watching someone else do it first. After seeing my siblings ride their bikes, I was able to mimic their motion and eventually learn how to ride a bike. The same idea goes for sports. When I was learning to play lacrosse as a kid, I started off not knowing how to even pass the ball. It is not something you can explain to someone because you have to be able to feel it and create the correct motion to complete a pass. I would play with my dad and just watch him and see how he moved to throw the ball and try to copy exactly what he did and eventually it worked out. If I was given the equipment and a wall without someone to copy I would never have learned how to make a pass.
Observational learning is the key to acquiring most of our basic skills and without it, every day tasks would be nearly impossible. Just try explaining something simple to a friend with only words and I can almost guarantee that they will mess up somewhere. It is an essential part to our learning capabilities.
I agree with you that many of the basic skills we learn in life are learned through observational learning. Some things are just easier to learn if you can see them be done first. For example, sports, we learn how to play sports by observing others.
When I was younger, I remember going to basketball camps, and the camp counselors would tell us to watch them first. A specific example is doing a layup. They would show us gradually how to perform this task. If I did not see someone do this first before I even tried, it would have been much more difficult.
Another aspect of life where we see observational learning is in technology. Most of us probably learned how to use a computer by watching others. I had a computer class in grade school, where the teacher would show us how to get onto the internet, go to a search engine, search a specific subject, and then use that information to write a paper. Once we saw her do it, it made it easier to understand and learn.
Observational learning is used all the time, but we must be able to pay attention to what is done, we must remember what was done, we must be able to imitate what was done, and we must have a desire to perform it ourselves.