direct purposeful experience essay

Edgar Dale’s Cone of Experience: A Comprehensive Guide

June 1, 2023
Learning Theory , Online Learning
15 Min Read

Sounds pretty complicated right? In a nutshell, Dale’s Cone of Experience showcases how we can use a variety of materials and mediums to maximise learner experiences.

Known in some circles as the ‘Learning Pyramid’, Dale’s Cone of Experience is one of the most commonly misrepresented learning theories.

But before we clear up the misconceptions, let’s take a step back and learn more about Edgar Dale, the father of the Cone of Experience.

Who Is Edgar Dale?

Edgar Dale was born in 1900, and he grew up on a family farm in North Dakota, United States. He earned both his Bachelors and Masters degrees from the University of North Dakota and made his way as a teacher in a small rural school.

Dale completed his PhD at the University of Chicago and joined the Eastman Kodak Company. Nowadays simply known as Kodak, the company remains a dominant player in the photography industry.

This can be seen as the start of his research career. After all, Dale completed some of the earliest studies on learning from film while at Eastman Kodak Company.

After this, Dale enjoyed a long career as a professor at Ohio State University (1929-1970). He also served as President of the Division of Visual Instruction of the National Education Association (NEA), now known as the Association for Educational Communication and Technology.

In addition to mentoring doctoral students and working as a professor, Dale made significant contributions in many areas of research. To name a few, his work includes:

How to Appreciate Motion Pictures ( 1933 )
Teaching with Motion Pictures ( 1937 )
Audiovisual Methods in Teaching ( 1946 , 1954 , 1969 )
Building a Learning Environment ( 1972 )
The Living Word Vocabulary: The Words We Know ( 1976 )
The Educator’s Quotebook ( 1984 )

According to Wagner (1970) , Dale used his position to fight relentlessly for a better school system, academic freedom and civil rights.

The Cone of Experience

In his first edition of Audiovisual Methods in Teaching ( 1946 ), Dale introduced the ‘Cone of Experience’. The Cone placed different educational media and methods in a continuum from the most concrete experiences at the bottom to the most abstract at the top.

When a learner moves from direct and purposeful experiences to verbal symbols, the degree of abstraction gradually grows. And as a result, learners become spectators rather than participants.

Learners can see, handle, taste, touch, feel and smell the most purposeful experiences. By contrast, verbal symbols, such as use of words, speech or auditory language, at the peak of the Cone are highly abstract. This means they do not have a physical resemblance to the objects or ideas in question.

As such, the Cone of Experience explains the interrelationships of the various types of media and their individual ‘positions’ in the learning process. This makes it a valuable tool that helps instructional designers and L&D professionals incorporate the right audiovisual materials into their classroom or online training interventions.

However, Dale’s Cone of Experience has been widely misrepresented. Let’s have a look at the common misconceptions!

‘Corrupted Cone’ – Common Misconceptions

Dale intended to produce an intuitive model of the concreteness of various kinds of audiovisual media. However, the model has been widely and frequently misunderstood and misused.

The Cone is often 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.

Let’s play a game of spot the difference. The illustration directly below is what most share as the ‘Cone of Experience’. You’ve probably seen it before, on social media, or in an article about effective learning approaches.

We’ll come to discover that this cone is completely bogus. It’s the cone below that accurately represents the levels Edgar Dale introduced in his original model. We’ll dig into the detail in the next section.

Mythical Retention Scores

As we can see from the illustrations, the corrupted model purports to inform learners of how much people remember based on how they receive information. 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 do.

Suspiciously round numbers, no? But when you compare the corrupted model to Dale’s actual Cone of Experience, you notice that Dale did not include any numbers or percentages.

In fact, Dale never mentioned the relationship between the level of the Cone and the learners’ level of recall. Instead, he simply used the shape to convey the gradual loss of sensory information in learning interventions.

Still, many educators and learning professionals mistakenly believe that the bogus cone is Dale’s work. And it’s no wonder why! A quick Google search reveals an astonishing number of incorrect attributions.

After seeing how widely the corrupted cone was spreading, Subramony, Molenda, Betrus and Thalheimer combined their powers in an attempt to debunk the myths. They have since published various articles ( 2014a , 2014b , 2014c ) on the topic, and they even have a website focusing on the corrupted cone.

According to their research , the retention data, referring to the percentages seen in the corrupted cone, dates back to ‘folkloric maxims’ from the early 1900s. And while several authors and publications mention such percentages (without the cone), none provide a source for the research.

As such, it doesn’t come as a surprise that these magical retention percentages can be seen to fluctuate significantly. After all, this retention data is not supported by empirical data .

Misunderstood Application

On top of these mystical retention percentages, Dale’s Cone of Experience has been misapplied for decades. For instance, some interpret the model as suggesting that direct learning experiences are inherently better than the more abstract audiovisual experiences offered at the top of the cone.

But this is far from how Dale intended his Cone to be used. In his 1969 edition of Audiovisual Methods in Teaching, Dale notes that the Cone is merely a visual analogy. It shows the progression of learning experiences from the concrete to the abstract.

The shape had nothing to do with deciding that one kind of experience is better than another. It is not a hierarchy of learning efficiency. In fact, Dale even explained that too much reliance on concrete experience may actually obstruct the process of meaningful generalisation.

And on top of all that, Dale actually advised his readers not to take the cone too literally in the first place! He intended the Cone to be a descriptive model, instead of a roadmap for lesson or training planning.

Using Learning Theories & Models to improve your training initiatives

The Cone Uncorrupted

Now that we have overcome some of the misconceptions, let’s have a look at the eleven levels of Dale’s authentic Cone of Experience.

The base of the model is characterised by more concrete experiences. These include direct experiences, contrived experiences and dramatic participation.

The middle of the Cone is slightly more abstract, where learners observe without action. These experiences are less concrete than the lower levels, as learners do not interact directly with the phenomenon.

The peak of the Cone displays the most abstract experiences, which are represented with limited degrees of realism by symbols. These include visual and verbal symbols, like listening to the spoken word.

As such, the arrangement of the levels in the Cone is not based on its difficulty. Instead, it focuses on abstraction and the number of senses involved. Instructional designers can mix and interrelate these experiences to foster more meaningful learning.

Let’s have a look at each level individually, working our way down the Cone!

11. Verbal Symbols

As explored, each level of the Cone moves the learner a step further away from real-life experiences. As such, experiences focusing only on the use of verbal symbols are the furthest removed from real life.

Verbal symbols are highly abstract as they bear no physical resemblance to the objects or ideas they stand for. In fact, these verbal symbols provide no visual representation or clues to their meaning.

Dale used the word ‘horse’ to illustrate this. Writing the word ‘horse’ does not look like a horse, sound like a horse or feel like a horse. In fact, the letters H-O-R-S-E don’t look, sound, smell, taste, or feel anything like the actual animal.

This is true, regardless of the language you use. For instance, you spell a horse as ‘hevonen’ in Finnish, ‘cheval’ in French or ‘hest’ in Danish. Fun words, no doubt, but none of them resemble the animal itself. Instead, they share a common meaning that native speakers often learn at a very young age.

10. Visual Symbols

The other highly abstract level includes visual symbols, such as charts, maps, graphs and diagrams that are used for conceptual representation. These visual symbols help to make just about any reality into something easier to understand.

In fact, from sports team logos to traffic signs, we see symbols everywhere. These symbols help people understand the world . Just as with verbal symbols, visual symbols help drive understanding by conveying a meaning that is shared by the rest of society.

Visual symbols often include simple illustrations that do not include any unnecessary detail. This makes them relatively easy to procure and prepare. And that’s what every instructional designer wants to hear, right?

9. Recordings, Radio and Still Pictures

Edgar Dale first created this model in 1946. As such, he included the multimedia assets of his time, such as recordings, radio and still pictures. In more modern terms, this level could include photos, podcasts or audio files.

If you go back to the ‘corrupted cone’, one of the common misrepresentations treats ‘seeing’ as more effective than ‘hearing’.

Yet, Dale placed visual and auditory media on a similar level of abstraction. After all, in both cases, you are merely observing visual symbols (like still photos) or verbal symbols (like audio recordings). Neither example actively asks anything of the learner.

8. Motion Pictures and 7. Educational Television

Most recent publications combine levels eight and seven into one category. After all, motion pictures and television are similar mediums. They enable learners to process real-life processes or events through on-screen recordings.

Motion pictures and educational television include, for example, videos, animations and tv programmes, which imply value and messages through moving pictures. These are abstract experiences, as learners focus on observation instead of active participation.

As a result, learners have little or no opportunity to participate in or use senses other than seeing and hearing. But while streaming experiences can’t recreate the richness of reality, videos do present an on-screen abstraction of real-life processes and events.

In fact, videos are effective for presenting movement and continuity of ideas. You could even say that motion pictures and television provide a ‘window to the world’.

This has benefits when it comes to using videos in training. After all, you can edit out any irrelevant parts, zoom in on details, highlight information, or slow things down to provide focus. Learners can also rewind and replay the video as many times as they need to.

However, there is much controversy surrounding the benefits and disadvantages of television and motion pictures. Yet, research shows that educational programmes can enhance children’s intellectual development and provide experiences that are otherwise unreachable.

6. Exhibits

The sixth level of Dale’s Cone of Experience moves us away from the most abstract experiences. This is the first level that opens the door for an expanded range of sensory and participatory experiences.

In fact, this level can be summarised as meaningful displays with limited handling. After all, most exhibits are experiences that are for the eyes only. Yet, some exhibits include sensory elements that can be related to direct purposeful experiences. These exhibits are specifically designed for interactivity.

As a result, this experience allows learners to see the meaning and relevance of things based on the different pictures and representations presented. Visiting exhibits in educational outlets like museums are a common way to provide learning opportunities .

After all, exhibits are a great way to present students with exposure to new ideas, discoveries and inventions that would be more difficult to display in a classroom setting.

5. Study Trips

Study trips offer the sights and sounds of real-world settings. The main activity focuses on observing from the sidelines, aside from occasional opportunities to participate. Participation could include, for instance, hopping in a fire truck or milking a cow.

These rich experiences help learners to learn more about different objects, systems and situations. As such, study trips provide an opportunity to experience something that learners cannot be encounter within the traditional classroom space.

Similarly, field trips expand the social learning opportunities provided by online learning. As a result, the learning experience is not limited to the traditional training setting but rather extended to a more complex environment.

The effectiveness of field trips has been researched extensively . They are well regarded , given how easy it is to provide every student with the same real-life experience.

In addition, students can see connections between their training experiences and the ‘real world’. This type of elaboration is known to be an effective learning technique .

4. Demonstrations

A demonstration is a visualised explanation of facts, ideas or processes. They are a common way to train employees or students, as they require relatively little preparation and resources. After all, individuals observe a lot simply by watching others.

On top of that, demonstrations can include pictures, drawings, film and other types of media in order to facilitate clear and effective learning. This approach helps to showcase how individuals can complete these tasks in real life.

Like exhibits and field trips, demonstrations may or may not include an element of participation. As such, demonstrations sit in the middle of the Cone based on their abstraction.

Demonstrations are especially useful if a hands-on activity is logistically unfeasible. However, demonstrations don’t come without limitations! Learners may not interpret or conceive the information as well as intended. Other factors affect the learning experience too. For instance, some learners may have worse visibility of the demonstration.

Similarly, demonstrations alone may not be enough in all learning situations. After all, seeing how a task is done is rarely as good as trying to do it ourselves.

3. Dramatised Experiences

Dramatised experiences can be seen as role-play exercises. This means reconstructing situations for learning purposes. As a result, the third level involves shifting learners — at least some of them — from observers to active participants.

This enables learners to participate in reconstructed experiences that could give them a better understanding of the idea or concept. In this manner, dramatising real-life experiences can help learners to get closer to certain realities that are not easily available first-hand.

They also provide a safe environment for experimentation. For instance, it’s much better to fail in a sales negotiation role-play than it is to fail in real life.

Learners can become more familiar with the concepts as they emerge themselves into the “as-if” situation. Similarly, learners can observe their peers to take their learning even further! This enables them to compare and contrast what they may have done differently.

2. Contrived Experiences

The second level is called contrived experiences, which focuses on the ‘editing’ of reality. At this level, teachers use representative models and mock-ups to provide an experience that is as close to reality as possible.

This can make the concept easier to grasp. After all, some realities are far too complex to take in all at once. As such, contrived experiences are imitations that sometimes teach better than the realities they imitate.

Contrived experiences are very practical and make the learning experience more accessible. After all, they have a concrete nature that permits easy visualization and helps to foster a better understanding of the concept at hand. And on top of all that, contrived experiences are easier to manipulate or operate!

1. Direct Purposeful Experiences

The bottom level of Dale’s Cone of Experience is also the least abstract. Direct purposeful experiences are hands-on activities that grant us responsibility for driving a specific outcome. We are active agents in the learning experience. In a sense, direct purposeful experiences are an unabridged version of life itself.

These rich, full-bodied experiences can be considered the bedrock of all education. After all, learners can see, handle, taste, feel, touch and smell these experiences. As such, at this level, learners use more senses in order to build up their knowledge.

Learners learn by doing tasks themselves. As a result, learning happens through actual hands-on experiences.

The Relevance of Cone of Experience

The Cone of Experience was first created decades ago, in 1946. And even decades after his passing, Dale’s work continues to influence the educational technologies field. Its utility in selecting instructional resources and activities is just as practical today as when Dale created the Cone.

The Cone has also inspired the birth of other models. For instance, Baukal et al. (2013) built upon Dale’s ideas and created the Multimedia Cone of Abstraction .

Even though Dale himself recommended not to take the model too seriously, it does guide us in creating effective learning environments. Let’s take a look!

The Cone in Learning And Development

In his 1969 version of Audiovisual Methods in Teaching, Dale introduced ‘rich experiences’. According to Dale, effective learning environments should offer memorable and rich experiences where learners can use multiple senses. He characterised rich experiences as follow:

Students use their eyes, ears, noses, mouths and hands to explore and immerse the experience.
Learners have the chance to discover new experiences.
Training events are emotionally rewarding and will motivate participants to continue learning throughout their lives.
Students have the opportunity to reflect on their past experiences to create new experiences.
Learners get a sense of personal achievement.
And students can create their own dynamic experiences.

As such, it is clear that no one level of Dale’s Cone of Experience is sufficient to generate a ‘rich’ learning experience. With this in mind, instructional designers should focus on creating memorable learning experiences where learners can see, hear, taste, touch and try.

Furthermore, we need to take advantage of other media. As long as all mediums are beneficial for your learners, you can combine as many as you wish.

Learning Strategies

Dale thought that the school system forced students to memorise information instead of actually learning how to think or solve real problems. Unfortunately, the current school system has been criticised for adopting the same approach.

For this reason, Dale argued that we should use revolutionary approaches to improve the quality of educational learning environments. One way to do this is to introduce a range of audiovisual materials to create vivid and memorable learning experiences. Like Dale ( 1969 , p. 23) describes:

“Thus, through the skillful use of radio, audio recording, television, video recording, painting, line drawing, motion picture, photograph, model, exhibit, poster, we can bring the world to the classroom. We can make the past come alive either by reconstructing it or by using records of the past.”

In other words, instructional designers must implement learning strategies fuelled by interaction. They can do so by introducing modern learning techniques.

In fact, a growing body of research shows that training interventions that use well-designed multimedia content are more effective than those that don’t. Text only learning interventions could soon be a thing of the past.

Indeed, to get the best results, instructional designers should mix approaches, balancing concrete and abstract experiences. This helps them to cater to and address all learner needs in order to help each learner in their learning journey.

Modern Learning Technology

Luckily, current learning technology makes this easier than ever before! Growth Engineering LMS , for instance, lets you use a variety of content types to build your training plan. This empowers you to create rich experiences.

This can range from your regular PDFs and slideshows to video and audio files, not to forget virtual classroom sessions and informal learning opportunities. In fact, innovative social learning features ensure learners can discover and create their own dynamic experiences.

Gamification , on the other hand, helps learners to get a sense of personal achievement as they accrue Experience Points (XP) or climb up the Leaderboard . Gamification is also utilised for the most immersive learning strategies, whereby learners physically participate in their training content. This resembles real-life situations and processes.

In addition, some of our modern forms of multimedia were not available when Dale created his Cone of Experience. For instance, virtual reality and augmented reality are relatively new additions to training. These inventions have the potential to showcase extremely realistic simulations that help to create contrived learning experiences.

Similarly, some of the elements in Dale’s Cone, like educational television, are not as relevant today as they were when Dale first created his model. But according to recent research , one could easily update the Cone to tally harmoniously with modern technology.

However, while these assets and approaches help you to create rich training experiences, it’s essential to get the balance right. As such, you should vary your content formats and broader concepts to facilitate effective and meaningful learning.

Final Words

Dale’s Cone of Experience is a wildly misunderstood model. Despite this, it remains useful even for today’s weathered instructional designers.

After all, it showcases how we can use a variety of materials and mediums to maximise learner experiences. It also helps us to think about the sensory impact of our learning content.

Still, if you only take away one thing from this article, let it be this: don’t go around telling people that you only remember 10% of what you read!

If you would like to learn more about different learning models and theories, check out our guidebook ‘ Using Learning Theories & Models to Improve Your Training Initiatives ’ now!

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Sang Joon Lee and Thomas C. Reeves

Editor’s Note: The following chapter was based on the following article, previously published in Educational Technology.

Lee, S. J., & Reeves, T. C. (2007). Edgar Dale: A significant contributor to the field of educational technology. Educational Technology, 47 (6), 56.

How can teachers use audiovisual materials to promote learning that persists? How can audiovisual materials enable students to enjoy learning through vicarious experience? These were two of the many important research and development questions addressed by an extraordinary educational technology pioneer, Edgar Dale. Although he is perhaps best remembered today for his often misinterpreted “Cone of Experience,” Dale made significant contributions in many areas as evidenced by just a few of the titles of the many books he wrote during his long lifespan (1900-1988), including: How to Appreciate Motion Pictures (1933), Teaching with Motion Pictures (1937), How to Read a Newspaper (1941), Audiovisual Methods in Teaching (1946, 1954, 1969), Techniques of Teaching Vocabulary (1971), Building a Learning Environment (1972), The Living Word Vocabulary: The Words We Know (1976), and The Educator’s Quotebook (1984).

Born in 1900 at the dawn of a new millennium, Edgar Dale’s work continues to influence educational technologists in the 21st Century. Dale grew up on a North Dakota farm, and according to Wagner (1970), he retained the no-nonsense thinking habits and strong work ethic of his Scandinavian forebears throughout his illustrious career. While working on the family farm and later as a teacher in a small rural school, Dale earned both his Bachelors and Masters degrees from the University of North Dakota partially through correspondence courses.

In 1929, he completed a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, and then joined the Eastman Kodak Company where he collaborated on some of the earliest studies of learning from film. Interestingly, although many of these early studies were experimental ones designed to compare learning from film with other media, Dale later expressed distain for such studies. According to De Vaney and Butler (1996):

When Dale was asked why he did not do experimental research in which a scholar attempted to prove over and over that students learn from radio or film, he replied: “It always bothers me, because anybody knows that we learn from these things (media). There’s no issue about that. . . . Well I suppose in any field, to be respectable you have to do a certain kind of research. (p. 17)

In addition to his own prolific scholarship, Edgar Dale mentored an outstanding cadre of doctoral students during his long role as a professor at Ohio State University (1929-1973), including Jeanne Chall and James Finn. Dale also served as President of the Division of Visual Instruction (DVI) of the National Education Association (NEA) from 1937-38, the professional association that is now known as the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT).

Although he traced his ideas back as far as Pestalozzi (1746 – 1827), who pioneered the concept of learning through activity, and Froebel (1782 – 1852), who first promoted the principle that children have unique needs and capabilities, Edgar Dale’s work was most heavily influenced by John Dewey (1859-1952). Dewey stressed the importance of the continuity of learning experiences from schools into the real world and argued for a greater focus on higher order outcomes and meaningful learning.

In his first edition of Audiovisual Methods in Teaching (1946), Dale expanded Dewey’s concept of the continuity of learning through experience by developing the “Cone of Experience” which relates a concrete to abstract continuum to audiovisual media options (Seels, 1997). Dale (1969) regarded the Cone as a “visual analogy” (p. 108) to show the progression of learning experiences from the concrete to the abstract (see Figure 1) rather than as a prescription for instruction with media. In the last edition of Audiovisual Methods in Teaching (1969), Dale integrated Bruner’s (1966) three modes of learning into the Cone by categorizing learning experiences into three modes: enactive (i.e., learning by doing), iconic (i.e., learning through observation), and symbolic experience (i.e., learning through abstraction).

In moving toward the pinnacle of the Cone from direct, purposeful experiences to verbal symbols, the degree of abstraction gradually increases. As a result, learners become spectators rather than participants (Seels, 1997). The bottom of the Cone represented “purposeful experience that is seen, handled, tasted, touched, felt, and smelled” (Dale, 1954, p. 42). By contrast, at the top of the Cone, verbal symbols (i.e., words) and messages are highly abstract. They do not have physical resemblance to the objects or ideas. As Dale (1969) wrote, “The word horse as we write it does not look like a horse or sound like a horse or feel like a horse” (p. 127).

Dale (1969) explained that the broad base of the cone illustrated the importance of direct experience for effective communication and learning. Especially for young children, real and concrete experiences are necessary to provide the foundation of their permanent learning. The historical importance of Dale’s Cone rests in its attempt to relate media to psychological theory (Seels, 1997) and the Cone has shaped various sets of media selection guidelines ever since. For example, influenced by Dale, Briggs (1972) delineated general principles for media selection according to the age of learners, the type of learners, and the type of task.

Current Application

Dale’s Cone of Experience continues to influence instructional designers today in both theory and practice. For example, Baukal, Auburn, and Ausburn built upon Dale’s ideas in developing their Multimedia Cone of Abstraction , available at http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1101723.pdf .

In addition to this confusion, the implications of Dale’s Cone have been misunderstood or misapplied. For example, Dale’s Cone has been used to maintain that more realistic and direct experience is always better. However, Dale (1969) demurred, writing that, “Too much reliance on concrete experience may actually obstruct the process of meaningful generalization” (p. 130). Also, Dale noted that providing realistic learning experiences may not be efficient in terms of cost, time, and efforts. Instead, Dale suggested that teachers should balance combinations of concrete and abstract learning experiences.

For a thorough analysis of the prevalence of the “Remembering Cone” myth in instructional design, along with analysis tracing the history of this myth and the evidence against it, see the final issue in 2014 of Educational Technology , which presented a special issue on the topic.

While learning by doing (direct, purposeful experience) may be better than learning through abstraction (symbolic experience), explain why you think Dale (1969) felt that “Too much reliance on concrete experience may actually obstruct the process of meaningful generalization.”

Experiential Learning Environments

In another book Can You Give The Public What It Wants (1967), Dale reiterated Dewey’s influence on his ideas by writing: “As I return to Democracy and Education [published by Dewey in 1916] I always find a new idea that I had not seen or adequately grasped before” (p. 186). Dale (1969) described learning as a “fourfold organic process” (p. 42) which consisted of needs, experiences, incorporation of the experiences, and the use of them. To promote permanent learning, Dale asserted that teachers should help students identify their needs for learning and set clearly defined learning goals related to their needs. A learning experience must be personally meaningful with respect to students’ backgrounds and developmental stages and the nature of the experience should be logically arranged to help students incorporate new knowledge with what they already have. Later, students should have opportunities to practice and try out their new knowledge in real life as well as in learning contexts. Dale (1972) wrote:

To experience an event is to live through it, to participate in it, to incorporate it, and to continue to use it. To experience is to test, to try out. It means to be a concerned participant, not a half-attentive observer. (p. 4)

Thus, effective learning environments should be filled with rich and memorable experiences where students can see, hear, taste, touch, and try. Dale (1969) articulated the characteristics of rich experiences. In a rich experience:

students are immersed in it and use their eyes, ears, noses, mouths and hands to explore the experience,
students have a chance to discover new experiences and new awareness of them,
students have emotionally rewarding experiences that will motivate them for learning throughout their lives,
students have chances to practice their past experiences and combine them to create new experiences,
students have a sense of personal achievement, and
students can develop their own dynamic experiences.

In Dale’s perspective (1972), most students in schools did not learn how to think, discover, and solve real problems. Rather, students were forced to memorize facts and knowledge in most schools, and as a result, any knowledge they acquired was inert in their real lives. For this reason, he argued that we should have revolutionary approaches to improve the quality of educational learning environments. To build learning environments infused with rich experiences, Dale argued for the development of new materials and methods of instruction. Dale promoted the potential of audiovisual materials, believing that they could provide vivid and memorable experiences and extend them regardless of the limitations of time and space. Dale (1969) argued:

Thus, through the skillful use of radio, audio recording, television, video recording, painting, line drawing, motion picture, photograph, model, exhibit, poster, we can bring the world to the classroom. We can make the past come alive either by reconstructing it or by using records of the past. (p. 23)

Dale believed that audiovisual materials could help students learn from others’ first-hand experience, or vicarious experience. Dale (1967) claimed, “Audiovisual materials furnish one especially effective way to extend the range of our vicarious experience” (p. 23). Dale concluded that audiovisual materials could provide a concrete basis for learning concepts, heighten students’ motivation, encourage active participation, give needed reinforcement, widen student experiences and improve the effectiveness of other materials.

Although as noted above, Dale (1969) did not advocate comparative media studies, he did recommend evaluating combinations of media and instructional materials in actual learning environments. Amazingly, Dale anticipated the direction of media research as if he had been privy to the Great Media Debate between Clark (1994) and Kozma (1994). Dale (1969) provided an analogy:

As we think about freight cars and their contents we can and do distinguish them. But the vehicle and its contents are closely linked. The gondola car is linked with coal: we do not haul oil in it. The piggy-back conveyances for transporting automobiles are not used to transport wheat. In all communicating of messages, therefore, we must consider the kind of vehicle used to transport them, realizing that medium-message characteristics will influence what can be “sent” to a receiver. (p. 133)

Dale recommended that researchers should look at the effects of combinations of media in the environment where they will be used rather than the testing of a single, isolated medium in the laboratory. By conducting research in real classrooms, the varied combinations of possible factors such as attributes of audiovisual materials, how to use and administer them, learners’ characteristics, and learning environments could be examined because learning occurs through dynamic interaction among the learner, the context, and the media. Although the experimental methods of educational and psychological research were focused on testing the tenets of behaviorism and pitting one media against another throughout most of his career, Dale was prescient in his recognition that the complexities of learning render most such studies fruitless.

Final Remark s

Dale was much more than a scholar isolated in the ivory towers of academe. As described by Wagner (1970), “He actively fought for better schools, academic freedom, civil rights, and other causes long before these became popular issues” (p. 94). Dale also anticipated the still-neglected importance of media education by promoting in the 1930s the then radical notion that teachers should help their students to understand the effects of media on them, their parents, and society, and to learn how to critically evaluate the contents of the radio, newspapers, and films. Dale was a socially responsible researcher, a thoughtful humanist, and dedicated educator. Any educational technologist seeking inspiration for their work in our field would find no better role model than Edgar Dale.

Application Exercises

Think about your most memorable learning experience. How was it (or how was it not) a “rich experience” as defined by Dale?
Dale felt that a rich experience would be “emotionally rewarding” and “motivate [learners] for learning throughout their lives.” Describe an experience you have had that was emotionally rewarding and motivated you to continue learning throughout your life.
Why does Dale suggest teachers balance their time providing concrete and abstract teaching opportunities?

Briggs, L. J. (1972). Students’ guide to handbook of procedures for the design of instruction . Pittsburgh, PA: American Institutes for Research.

Bruner, J. S. (1966). Toward a theory of instruction . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.

Clark, R. E. (1994). Media will never influence learning. Educational Technology Research and Development, 42 (2), 21-29.

Dale, E. (1933). How to appreciate motion pictures . New York: Macmillan Company.

Dale, E. (1935). The content of motion pictures . New York: Macmillan Company.

Dale, E. (1937). Teaching with motion pictures . Washington, DC: American Council on Education.

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Acknowledgements
Introduction
List of Authors
Author Index
I. Definitions and History
1. The Proper Way to Become an Instructional Technologist
2. What Is This Thing Called Instructional Design?
3. History of LIDT
4. A Short History of the Learning Sciences
5. LIDT Timeline
6. Programmed Instruction
7. Edgar Dale and the Cone of Experience
8. Twenty Years of EdTech
II. Learning and Instruction
10. Intelligence
11. Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Constructivism
12. Sociocultural Perspectives of Learning
13. Learning Communities
14. Communities of Innovation
15. Motivation Theories and Instructional Design
16. Motivation Theories on Learning
17. Informal Learning
18. Overview of Problem-Based Learning
19. Connectivism
20. An Instructional Theory for the Post-Industrial Age
21. Using the First Principles of Instruction to Make Instruction Effective, Efficient, and Engaging
III. Design
22. Instructional Design Models
23. Design Thinking and Agile Design
24. What and how do designers design?
25. The Development of Design-Based Research
26. A Survey of Educational Change Models
27. Performance Technology
28. Defining and Differentiating the Makerspace
29. User Experience Design
IV. Technology and Media
30. United States National Educational Technology Plan
31. Technology Integration in Schools
32. K-12 Technology Frameworks
33. What Is Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge?
34. The Learner-Centered Paradigm of Education
35. Distance Learning
36. Old Concerns with New Distance Education Research
37. Open Educational Resources
38. The Value of Serious Play
39. Video Games and the Future of Learning
40. Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics
41. Opportunities and Challenges with Digital Open Badges
V. Becoming an LIDT Professional
42. The Moral Dimensions of Instructional Design
43. Creating an Intentional Web Presence
44. Where Should Educational Technologists Publish Their Research?
45. Rigor, Influence, and Prestige in Academic Publishing
46. Educational Technology Conferences
47. Networking at Conferences
48. PIDT, the Important Unconference for Academics
VI. Preparing for an LIDT Career
49. What Are the Skills of an Instructional Designer?
50. Careers in Academia: The Secret Handshake
51. Careers in K-12 Education
52. Careers in Museum Learning
53. Careers in Consulting
Final Reading Assignment
Index of Topics
Translations

Edgar Dale and the Cone of Experience

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Editor’s Note

The following chapter was based on the following article, previously published in Educational Technology .

Lee, S. J., & Reeves, T. C. (2007). Edgar Dale: A significant contributor to the field of educational technology. Educational Technology, 47 (6), 56.

When Dale was asked why he did not do experimental research in which a scholar attempted to prove over and over that students learn from radio or film, he replied: “It always bothers me, because anybody knows that we learn from these things (media). There’s no issue about that. . . . Well I suppose in any field, to be respectable you have to do a certain kind of research. (p. 17)

Current Application

Dale’s Cone of Experience continues to influence instructional designers today in both theory and practice. For example, Baukal, Auburn, and Ausburn built upon Dale’s ideas in developing their Multimedia Cone of Abstraction [https://edtechbooks.org/-Yq] , available at https://edtechbooks.org/-Yq .

Multimedia Cone of Abstraction

As noted above, Dale’s Cone has been frequently misunderstood and misused. Dale’s Cone is often confounded with the “Remembering Cone” or “Bogus Cone” (Subramony, 2003, p. 27) which claims that learners will generally remember 10 percent of what they read, 20 percent of what they hear, 30 percent of what they see, 50 percent of what they hear and see, 70 percent of what they say, and 90 percent of what they both say and do. Even though Dale did not mention the relationship between the level of the Cone and a learner’s level of recall, many practitioners mistakenly believe that the bogus “Remembering Cone” was Dale’s work. A Google search reveals an astonishing number of attributions of the “Bogus Cone” to Edgar Dale. Molenda (2003) concludes that the so-called empirical evidence for the “Remembering Cone” appears to have been fabricated by petroleum industry trainers in the 1960s.

Final Remarks

Think about your most memorable learning experience. How was it (or how was it not) a “rich experience” as defined by Dale?
Dale felt that a rich experience would be “emotionally rewarding” and “motivate [learners] for learning throughout their lives.” Describe an experience you have had that was emotionally rewarding and motivated you to continue learning throughout your life.
Why does Dale suggest teachers balance their time providing concrete and abstract teaching opportunities?