Lesson:5 A Cone of Experience

The Cone was originally developed by Edgar Dale in 1946 and was intended as a way to describe various learning experiences. The diagram presented , is a modification of Dale’s original Cone; the percentages given relate to how much people remember and is a recent modification. Essentially, the Cone shows the progression of experiences from the most concrete (at the bottom of the cone) to the most abstract (at the top of the cone). It is important to note that Dale never intended the Cone to depict a value judgment of experiences; in other words, his argument was not that more concrete experiences were better than more abstract ones. Dale believed that any and all of the approaches could and should be used, e is a visual model, pictorial device that presents bands


According to Dale’s research, the least effective method at the top, involves learning from information 
presented through verbal symbols, i.e., listening to spoken words.  The most effective methods at the bottom, 
involves direct, purposeful learning experiences, such as hands-on or field experience.  Direct purposeful 
experiences represents reality or the closet things to real, everyday life.   
The cone charts the average retention rate for various methods of teaching.  The further you progress down 
the cone, the greater the learning and the more information is likely to be retained.  It also suggests that when 
choosing an instructional method it is important to remember that involving students in the process strengthens 
knowledge retention.   
It reveals that “action-learning” techniques result in up to 90% retention.  People learn best w


The Cone of Experience is essentially a visual metaphor for the idea that learning activities can be placed in broad categories based on the extent to which they convey the concrete referents of real-life experiences. Although it has sometimes been interpreted as advocating the selection of certain media and methods over others (favoring “realism”), such was not Dale’s stated intent. It has also been interpreted by many as a prescriptive formula for selecting instructional media. Dale’s own explanations are nebulous enough to enable a wide variety of interpretations to find support. Finally, there is the contemporary problem of the conflation of the Cone with the “Socony-Vacuum percentages.” The fact that the Cone has been taken seriously enough to be used in so many ways testifies to the robustness and attractiveness of Dale’s visual metaphor.

We are talking about the abstraction of the idea.