Cone of Experience
The commonly misrepresented learning theory - a note for tutors and parents
Edgar Dale was born in 1900, and he grew up on a family farm in North Dakota, United States. He went on to enjoy a long career at Ohio State University as a professor, using this position he often used it to fight relentlessly for a better school system and academic freedom.
In 1946 he introduced the ‘Cone of Experience’ which placed different educational media and methods in a continuation from the most concrete experiences at the bottom to the most abstract at the top.
The Cone itself however is often misrepresented - wrongly referred to as the ‘Cone of Learning’, ‘Learning Pyramid’ or ‘Remembering Cone’. What some refer to as the ‘corrupted cone’ is now widely misunderstood as Dale’s Cone of Experience.
This is what most refer to;
As we can see from the illustrations, the corrupted model suggests that learners remember information based on how they receive it. According to it, learners generally remember:
10% of what they read.
20% of what they hear.
30% of what they see.
50% of what they hear and see.
70% of what they say and write.
And 90% of what they do.
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