Bad Instructional Design: Dale’s Cone of Experience

Prepping for my class today I ran across the following image which is a modified version of: Dale’s Cone of Experience. Obviously there is no research to back this image up and I consider it fake. This just goes to show what goes on in our field as I found it on an instructional design website. And in fact, if you look up Dale’s cone on google you will find many education and instructional design sites with this fake image and they claim it is real.

Again, this image is not real (no research backing it up it is just made up):

Here is the site that is using this as part of their article – sorry I am not trying to offend you, its just this image is not real and you are using it)

So you can only remember 5% from lecture? Where did you get these stats from? 10% from reading? 20% from audio-visual? Look at my 2 studies on comprehension, learners scored around 50% using audio-visual on facts, concepts, rule/procedures and problem solving knowledge. And this was technical content that they had no prior knowledge in. If they had prior knowledge I would expect it to be significantly higher.

Also, here is a good site that breaks down just how wrong this image is: http://www.brainfriendlytrainer.com/theory/dale%E2%80%99s-cone-of-learning-figures-debunked

And for those who are interested, here is the original image that was published and then turned into the above one. And again, none of them (these two or others that look similar) have any research backing them up.

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