Dale's Cone of Expreience

            Edgar Dale created the cone of experience (1946) that he explained in his book on audiovisual methods in teaching.  The Cone of Experience is a graphical representation of Dale’s model of visual classification on ways of learning experiences.  The theory assisted in the development of utilizing audio-visual methods in teaching that were used within the instructional technology field.  The conical shape was used to create the symbolic depiction of learning from the most concrete level of experience located at the bottom of the cone to the most abstract level of experience located at the point of the cone.  The cone implemented a series of varied experiences from the very basic to enhanced learning experiences with the intent to immerse the learner further within the subject matter in order to retain a greater knowledge of the material.  The learner is meant to utilize a variety of senses (movement, sight, hearing, touching) at different intervals of experiences to create a direct learning process.  The original categories of Dale’s cone of experience starting from the top of the cone to bottom are as follows:  Verbal Symbols; Visual Symbols; Radio-Recordings-Still Pictures; Motion Pictures; Exhibits; Field Trips; Demonstrations; Dramatic Participation; Contrived Experiences; and Direct Purposeful Experiences.  Figure 1.
         Edgar Dale made changes within the cone of experience as advances in technology brought new and immersive ways of learning into teaching.  In Dale’s second edition to his book (1954), he made the change of Dramatic Participation to Dramatized Experiences and added television.

        In Summary, The Cone of Experience was created in the 1950’s as a way of implementing a series of various educational experiences listed in hierarchy in order to enhance the ability of a learner to retain the subject matter.  To this day, the Cone of Experience has been utilized within training environments with variances on the cone’s categories as technology advances.