Edgar Dale said: “The Cone is a visual analogy, and like all analogies, it does not bear an exact and detailed relationship to the complex elements it represents.”
According to Lucido and Borbado (1997) Hoban and Zissman in the early texts on audio and visual materials, stressed that there is a need to understand the “degree of realism” which it has. They arranged different communications and teaching methods in a hierarchy of greater and greater abstraction (Lucido and Borbado, 1997). They started with “the total situation” and culminating it with “words” at the top of the hierarchy. Edgar Dale adopted the same construct and improved on it by proposing the “Cone of Experience” in 1946.
We can see in his proposed idea that the participant, who is also the receiver, of the communication process is an observer in the actual experience. Then he moves the cone as observing symbols that represent the event (Lucido and Borbado, 1997).
Bruner’s
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Dale’s
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Symbolic
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Verbal Symbols
Visual Symbols
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Iconic
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Recordings
Radio
Still Pictures
Motion Pictures
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Enactive
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Television
Exhibits
Field Trips
Demonstrations
Dramatized Experiences
Contrived Experiences
Direct, Purposeful Experiences
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He said that the participant-receiver could make profitable use of more abstract communication activities to the extent that they had built up a stock of more concrete experiences to give meaning to the more abstract representations of reality.
Audio-visual media help to provide the necessary concrete experiences, while helping the participant-receiver to integrate their prior experiences. For example, a film may show how highways are being constructed. The viewer integrates this film to what he may actually have seen by way of the asphalting of streets in the city.
HOW DO WE ILLUSTRATE THE CONE OF EXPERIENCE?
Dale’s cone of experience of is a visual model, a pictorial device that presents various experiences that is set following a degree of abstraction and not level of difficulty. (Lucido and Borbado, 1997)
We can choose instructional methods more appropriately by thinking of our options in terms of concreteness and our audience/ learner’s readiness to profit from more and less concrete experiences. At the middle level are the audio-visual materials, substituting visual images for the real thing, leading to iconic learning. Printed materials, with their verbal symbols, are more abstract.
Edgar Dale deepens his explanation by stating that “the individual bands of the Cone of Experiencestand for experiences that are fluid, extensive, and continually interact.” (Dale, 1969) Corpuz and Lucido (2001) suggest that it should not be taken literally in its simplified form. They said that the “different kinds of sensory aid often overlap and sometimes blend into one another”. Motion Pictures can be silent or they can combine sight and sound. Furthermore, they stressed that students “may merely view a demonstration or they may view it and them participate.”
We need to clarify that Cone of Experience mean that not all teaching and learning should move systematically from the base to the pinnacle or from the direct purposeful experiences to verbal symbols.
Dale (1969) would say that we go back and forth to different kinds of experiences. We acquire new experiences everyday even in our simple and basic activities. When we teach, we do not only start from the base of the cone. Rather, we begin with the kind of experience that is most appropriate to the needs and abilities of the learner who is unique in his learning. Each student learns in various learning activities that suits their level and giftedness.
(Lifted from: Lucido, P and Corpuz, C. 2007. Educational Technology 1. Quezon City: Lorimar Publishing Inc.)
Direct Purposeful Experience
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These are first hand experiences which serve as the foundation of our learning. We build up our reservoir of meaningful information and ideas through seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. In the context of the teaching-learning process, it is leaning by doing. If I want my student to learn how to focus a compound microscope, I will let him focus one of course, after I showed him.
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Contrived Experiences
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We make use of representative models or mock ups of reality for practical reasons and so that we can make the real-life accessible to the students’ perception and understanding. For instance, a mockup of Apollo, the capsule for exploration of the moon, enabled the North American Aviation Co. to study the problem of lunar flight.
Recall how you were taught how to read time. Your teacher might have used a mocked clock. Those whose hands you could turn to set the time you were instructed to set.
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Dramatized Experience
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By dramatization, we can participate in a reconstructed experience, even though the original event is far removed from us in time. We relive the outbreak of the Philippine revolution by acting out the role of characters in the drama.
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Demonstrations
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It is visualized explanation of an important fact, idea or process by the use of photographs, drawings, films, displays, or guided motions. It is showing how things are done. A teacher in physical education shows the class how to dance tango.
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Study Trips
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These are excursions and visits conducted to observe an event that is unavailable within the classroom.
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Exhibits
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These are displays to be seen by spectators. They may consist of working models arranged meaningfully or photographs with models, charts, and posters. Sometimes, exhibits are “for your eyes only”. There are some exhibits, however, that include sensory experiences where expectators are allowed to touch or manipulate models displayed.
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Television
and
Motion Pictures
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Television and motion pictures can reconstruct reality of the past so effectively that we are made to feel we are there. The unique value of the messages communicated by film and television lies in their feeling of realism, their emphasis on the persons and personality, their organized presentation, and their ability to select, dramatize, highlight, and clarify.
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Still Pictures, Recordings, Radio
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These are visual and auditory devices which may be used by an individual or a group. Still pictures lack the sound and motion of a sound film. The radio broadcast of an actual event may often be likened to a televised broadcast minus its visual dimension.
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Visual Symbols
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These are no longer realistic reproduction of physical things of these are highly abstract representations. These are charts, graphs, maps, and diagrams.
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Verbal Symbols
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They are not like the objects or ideas for which they stand. They usually do not contain visual clues to their meaning. Written words fall under this category. It may be a world for a concrete object (book), an idea (freedom of speech), a scientific principle (the principle of balance), a formula (e=mc2)
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What are the implications of Cone of Experience in the teaching-learning process?
1. We do not use only one medium of communication in isolation. Rather we use many instructional materials to help the student conceptualize his experience.
2. We avoid teaching directly at the symbolic level of thought without adequate foundation of the concrete. Students’ concepts will lack deep roots in the direct experience. Dale cautions us when he said: “These rootless experiences will not have the generative power to produce additional concepts and will not enable the learner to deal with the new situations that he faces.” (Dale, 1969)
3. When teaching, we do not get stuck in the concrete, Let us strive to bring our students to the symbolic or abstract level to develop their higher order thinking skills.
If we want our students to remember and maser what was taught, we cannot ignore that the Cone of Experience reminds us: to make use of a combination of as many learning resources as we can and to proceed to the abstract only after we have presented the concrete. Do we have to end in the abstract? Or should the abstract lead us again to the concrete and the concrete to the abstract again? So learning is from the concrete to the abstract, from the abstract to the concrete and from the concrete to abstract again? It becomes a cycle.
The process of teaching and learning is a complex mental process. One cannot easily determine whether it is taking place or not. Benjamin Bloom devised a way to concretize the results by his classified educational objectives. According to him it should be specific, observable, measurable, researchable, and time-bounded terms. Another educationalist Jerome Bruner, a noted educator also devised his own version of the Cone of Experience in which he called threefold analysis.
Enactive
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Refers to direct actual experiences or encounters with what is. This is life on the raw, rich and unedited. They form the bases for all other learning experiences. (Example actual tying and then examining of a square knot by boy scouts during camp activities
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Iconic
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Refers to more abstract experiences which could be the form of pictures. (Example: identifying the picture of a square knot) the experience can be readily identified by the learner because he had previous actual experience with it. And the picture shows a resemblance of the actual object.
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Symbolic
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Refers to the use of worlds or printed materials which no longer resemble the object under study. Example: the word – square-knot. The learner can form a mental image about it. Thus he will be able to comprehend what it means.
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• The Cone of Experience is a visual model, a pictorial device that presents bands of experience arranged according to degree of abstraction and not degree of difficulty
• This model incorporates several theories related to instructional design and learning processes
• This was introduced by Edgar Dale (1946) in his textbook on audio visual methods in teaching.
• Dale made minor modifications of the visual in the second edition (1954) changing Dramatic Participation to Dramatized Experience 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.
• During the 1960s, Edgar Dale theorized that learners retain more information by what they “do” as opposed to what is “heard”, “read” or “observed”. His research led to the development of the Cone of Experience.
• Today, this “learning by doing” has become known as “experiential learning” or “action learning”.
How can Instructors Use the Cone of Experience?
• 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 closest to real, everyday life.
• The chart rates the average retention rate for various methods of teaching. The further ones progresses 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 when they use perceptual learning styles. Perceptual learning styles are sensory based. The more sensory channels possible in interacting with a resource, the better chance that many students can learn from it.
• According to Dale, instructors should design instructional activities that build upon more real-life experiences.
• Dale’s cone of experience is a tool to help instructors make decisions about resources and activities.
The instructor can ask the following:
• Where will student’s experience with this instructional resource fit on the cone? How far is it removed from real-life?
• What kind of learning experience do you want to provide in the classroom?
• How does this instructional resource augment the information supplied by the textbook?
• What and how many senses can students use to learn this instructional material?
• Does the instructional material enhance learning?
• Jerome Bruner (1966) presented a similar idea, emphasizing the mental operations of learners. Bruner suggested that successfully “thinking” at abstract levels involved progressing from related direct experiences (enactive), through related iconic experiences, and then into the realm of abstraction
References:
· Dale’s Cone of Experience by Anderson, Heidi M. University of Kentucky
· Cone of Experience by Molenda, Michael Indiana University
· Garo, C. 2007. Teaching Educational Technology. Mandaluyong City: National Bookstore, Inc.
· Lucido, P and Borabo, M. 1997. Educational Technology. Quezon City: Katha Publishing Co., Inc.
· Lucido, P and Corpuz, C. 2007. Educational Technology 1. Quezon City: Lorimar Publishing Inc.
· Roblyer, M. 2006. Integrating Educational Technology into Teaching. New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc.
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