Abstract

How do people learn skills, more specifically athletic skills? Looking closely at Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory, one can find the answer provided by observational learning. This study aimed to identify if contextual differences of an expert model had an effect on the acquisition of an athletic skill of shooting a free-throw. A review of the relevant literature was conducted to determine if modeling was an effective form of learning skills, including athletic skills. Lack of research into differences of context was the basis for the experiment that followed. The experiment looked at 34 (16 male. 18 female) students at Carthage College in learning athletic skills. A baseline was conducted to determine the average number of free-throws the participants could successfully make out of twenty. The participant then either watched a live or a video expert model demonstrate proper free-throw shooting technique. The results of this experiment indicated that context did not appear to affect the ability to learn how to shoot a free-throw, but the results and previous research raise questions about the duration of time learning from a model, as a factor, to acquire athletic skills.