Classifying instructional media: Dale's Cone of Experience, Bruner's Three-Fold Analysis of Experience and Hoban, Hoban and Zisman Hierarchy of Abstraction

1. CLASSIFYING
INSTRUCTIONAL MEDIA

2. Who is Edgar Dale?
“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.”
• Born April 17, 1900, Benson, Minnesota,
USA
• Cited as the Father of Modern
Audiovisual Education
• An American Educationalist who
developed the Cone of Experience.
• Professor of Education at Ohio State
University

3. The cone of experience
consists of bands which
arrange media used in
learning experience from
the most concrete to the
most abstract.
What is the Cone of
Experience?

4. • Some students focus mostly on
concrete (sensory) experience.
• Others prefer to think about
abstract concepts and theories.

5. The pattern of arrangement of the bands of experience is not
difficulty but degree of abstraction.
The individual bands of the Cone of Experience stand for
experience that are fluid, extensive and continually interact.
In our teaching then, we do not always begin with direct
experience at the base of the cone rather we begin with the
kind of experience that is most appropriate to the needs and
abilities of particular learner in a particular learning
situation. Then of course, we vary this experience with many
other types of learning activities.
-Dale 1969

6. Jerome Bruner’s
Three-Fold Analysis of
Experience

7. Who is Jerome Bruner?
• American Psychologist
• Born October 1, 1915, New York,
USA
• Devised another classification of
media parallel to Dale’s called
Three-Fold Analysis of
Experience or Three-Tiered
Model of Learning.

9. • The ENACTIVE part forms the bases of all
learning experience and it refers to the direct
or actual experiences.
• The ICONIC part refers to abstract
experiences in the form of pictures.
• The SYMBOLIC part represents the forming
of mental image in the absence of concrete
object.

10. Charles Hoban,
Charles Hoban Jr.
and Samuel
Zisman
A conceptual graph in
which visual media are
arranged along the y axis
while the learner’s level
of development-from the
concrete level of thinking
to the abstract level of
thinking is array along the
x axis.

11. Implications of the Cone of Experience in the teaching-
learning process
• We do not use only one medium of communication in isolation.
Rather we use many instructional materials to help the learner
conceptualize his/her experience
• We avoid teaching directly at the symbolic level of thought without
adequate foundation of the concrete. Leaner’s concepts will lack of
deep roots in direct experience. Dale caution us when he said: “these
rootless experiences will not have the generative power to produce
additional concepts and will not be able learner to deal with the new
situation that he faces.

12. • When teaching, we don’t 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.