During this past fall semester I came across a nice and short faculty focus article on Dale’s Cone of Experience. I must admit that I was very interested with the attitude advanced by the author, Dr. Dimple J. Martin (an assistant professor of early childhood education and faculty professional development at Miles College). Turns out he asks his students to keep an eye on his own teaching by keeping track of what learning modes they engage in during the course. Meaning that if he doesn’t put the effort in to reach his students in different modes (visual, auditory, manual, etc.) he will be told just that by the students and the hard data! Not sure I’m ready to do that in my own classroom, however, I do want to make sure I’m providing a diversity of learning modes to my students.

With that being said, I don’t want this post to be long. Nonetheless, I do want to bring attention to the image above and how important it is to understand for us teachers and our students. Two things jumped to my attention: First, active learning activities induce more remembering in our students than passive learning (nothing crazy here); Second, I realize that I mostly put the learning burden on my students AND outside of my classroom. Yes, I have group and hands-on activities in class, but students still spend most of their time in class hearing, seeing, watching videos, or watching a demonstration.

Food for thoughts right … Thank god there is the lab for students to learn!

If you made it down here, kudos because turns out the cone of experience as presented in the picture above is not based on any substantial data … if you want the long story feel free to go read the long article about all that here (it’s a very nice work). Long story short though, it is really not so much about the numbers (the part of the cone of experience above that is unsubstantiated), but more about the ranking. See the original cone of experience from Dale without any assumed remembering data:

Bottom line, let’s try to engage students more with the material rather than exposing them to it and hoping they’ll do the work at home (although they still need to do the work at home).