EDGAR DALE'S CONE OF EXPERIENCE

EDGAR DALE
Edgar Dale (April 27, 1900 – March 8, 1985) was a U.S. educationist who developed the famous Cone of Experience. He made several contributions to audio and visual instruction, including a methodology for analyzing the content of motion pictures


Dale was a professor of education at Ohio State University. In 1933 Dale wrote a paper on how to effectively create a High School film appreciation class. This paper has been noted for having a very different view of adolescent interaction with films than that taken by the Film Control Boards of the time.

CONE OF EXPERIENCE

Introduced by Edgar Dale (1946) in his textbook on audiovisual methods in teaching, the Cone of Experience is a visual device meant to summarize Dale’s classification system for the varied types of mediated learning experiences. The organizing principle of the Cone was a progression from most concrete experiences (at the bottom of the cone) to most abstract (at the top). 

The original labels for Dale’s ten categories are: Direct, Purposeful Experiences; Contrived Experiences; Dramatic Participation; Demonstrations; Field Trips; Exhibits; Motion Pictures; Radio – Recordings – Still Pictures; Visual Symbols; and Verbal Symbols.

When Dale researched learning and teaching methods he found that much of what we found to be true of direct and indirect (and of concrete and abstract) experience could be summarised in a pyramid or 'pictorial device' Dales called 'the Cone of Experience'. In his book 'Audio visual methods in teaching' - 1957, he stated that the cone was not offered as a perfect or mechanically flawless picture to be taken absolutely literally. It was merely designed as a visual aid to help explain the interrelationships of the various types of audio-visual materials, as well as their individual 'positions' in the learning process.

Dale points out that it would be a dangerous mistake to regard the bands on the cone as rigid, inflexible divisions. He said "The cone device is a visual metaphor of learning experiences, in which the various types of audio-visual materials are arranged in the order of increasing abstractness as one proceeds from direct experiences."

Dale made minor modifications of the visual in the second edition (1954), changing Dramatic Participation to Dramatized Experiences and adding Television. By the third edition of the textbook, Dale (1969) acknowledged the growing popularity of Jerome Bruner’s (1966) cognitive psychology concepts by overlaying Bruner’s classification system for modes of learning—enactive, iconic, and symbolic—on top of his own categories. This adaptation of his own schema may have been portentous, perhaps giving implied license to others to make other creative adaptations and interpretations, not always to the credit of Dale’s original notion.

Dale’s textbook in its three editions remained popular for over a quarter century. Inasmuch as the Cone provided the organizing principle for the book, it became ingrained in the thinking of generations of educational technology students and professors who used the textbook. It stimulated many efforts to extend the original idea by developing its implications for elementary education, secondary education, adult education, corporate training, and even

counseling.

AN EXAMPLE


Educational field trips are most of the common strategies used by educators to enrich student learning. To see a sample video, please click this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6BiBwOvxxo

In summary, 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.