Cone of Experience by Edward Dale

1. Edgar Dale’s
Cone of Experience

2. 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.
“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.”

3.  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).
 Is a visual model, a pictorial device that represents
bands of experience arranged according to degree of
abstraction and not a degree of difficulty.

6.  The first hand experiences which serve as the
foundation of our learning. In the teaching learning
process, it is learning by doing.
 EXAMPLES:
Preparing a meal, doing a power point
presentation, making a furniture, performing
laboratory experiments etc.

8.  These are excursions, educational trips, and visits
conducted to observe an event that is unavailable
within the classroom.

9. Television and Motion Pictures
•Television and motion pictures can reconstruct the
reality of the past so effectively that we are made to feel
we are there

10. Visual Symbols
•These are no longer realistic reproduction of physical
things for these are highly abstract representation.

11.  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 word for concrete objects (book) an idea
(freedom of speech), a scientific principle (principle of
balance), a formula.