Cone of Experience

The Cone of Experience is a visual model developed by educator Edgar Dale and presented in his 1946 book Audio-Visual Methods in Teaching, arranging learning experiences in a hierarchy from the most concrete, direct, hands-on experience at the base to the most abstract, purely verbal or symbolic experience at the apex, with various audiovisual media occupying intermediate positions. Dale intended the cone as a rough guide for choosing instructional media appropriate to a learner's level and the nature of the content, not as a claim about fixed retention rates for each level. The model is nonetheless widely reproduced today, including in teacher-training materials, in versions attaching specific numerical retention percentages to each band, such as remembering ten percent of what is read versus ninety percent of what is done, a set of figures with no basis in Dale's own work or in any identified research study and that learning scientists regard as an unsubstantiated myth that has attached itself to the original diagram.