Google Dale’s Cone of Experience and you’ll find a wealth of sites containing references not only to Edgar Dale’s original research, but to a series of percentages said to be associated with Dale’s Cone. For example, the .pdf file located at www.mc.uky.edu/pharmacy/edinnovation/pdf/Step%20Dales%20Cone.pdf contains a list of percentages associated with the elements in the Cone. This perpetuates a fallicy (or shoddy research practices) that is becoming more well known in recent years. Dale never assigned percentages re: effectiveness of learning activities in his work.

Will Thalheimer at Work-Learning Research delved into Dale’s Cone and discovered that:

1. While Edgar Dale indeed did indeed create a model of the concreteness of various audio-visual material back in 1946, the model contained no numbers and no research was conducted to create the model. Dale’s Cone was just a hunch, albeit an educated hunch, one that Dale warned shouldn’t be taken too literally.*
2. The percentages — ‘people generally remember 10% of what they read’ and so on — were most likely added to Dale’s Cone by an employee of the Mobil Oil company in the late 1960s. These percentages have since been discredited.**

Thalheimer’s complete report is available online at http://www.willatworklearning.com/myths_and_worse/index.html.

* and ** is from the Dales Cone Drum Corps article in the Internet TOURBUS 07/27/06 edition.

Michael Molenda of the Indiana University has witten a paper refuting the inclusion of percentages as part of Dale’s Cone of Experience. Mr. Molenda also authored a Reader Comment on an article published by Deepak Prem Subramony titled Dale’s Cone Revisited: Critically Examining the Misapplication of a Nebulous Theory to Guide Practice? in the July-August (2003) issue of Educational Technology.

Richard Crowest also wrote a dissertation titled “Making Sense. Multisensory Interpretation and the Visitor Experience“. Elements of his research focus on Dale’s original source material and indicates the lack of percentages in his work.

A number of adult educators and ID’s have written articles or blogged about this topic, some of the most relevant posts can be found at

• Visual Being: Forget What You’ve Heard About Remembering
• Infomacy: Hornswaggled: a Study in Active Learning
• Infomacy: Hornswaggled: These Data do NOT Exist
• e-Learning Acupuncture: Incorrect information in the field!
• Bogus Research Uncovered
• I Speak of Dreams: Oh my, Dale’s Cone is not a Cone but a Crock!
• Online Learning Research: Fact or Fiction

Ok, I admit it. I’m addicted to researching the phenomena of how one man’s theory becomes co-opted by others 😉 If I won the lottery I’d be spending way too much time and effort researching this.

Technorati Tags: Edgar Dale, Cone of Experience, learning retention, internet TOURBUS

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.