• People can learn through observation. This can be positive or negative – watching poor behaviour can lead to bad behaviour in others, be that violence or research skills!

• Mental states are important to learning.

• Learning does not necessarily lead to a change in behaviour; or rather people can learn new information without demonstrating new behaviours.

• Attention. In order to learn, you need to be paying attention. Anything that detracts your attention is going to have a negative effect on observational learning. If the teaching is interesting or there is a novel aspect to the situation, you are far more likely to dedicate your full attention to learning.

• Retention. The ability to store information is also an important part of the learning process. Retention can be affected by a number of factors, but remember that practical application of the learning can be especially effective.

• Reproduction. Once you have paid attention to the model and retained the information, it is time to actually perform the behaviour you observed. Further practice of the learned behaviour leads to improvement and skill advancement. In this book, we suggest that this is most often achieved through assessment.

• Motivation. Finally, in order for observational learning to be successful, you have to be motivated to imitate the behaviour you have seen. It is suggested that reinforcement and punishment play an important role in motivation – think of the latter more in the terms of ‘not rewarding bad behaviour’, so not allowing poor timekeeping, or letting people get away with not completing activities.