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There are some dodgy research ‘results’ around.
But although they are bad science, they have survived because they feel true.
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There are some dodgy research ‘results’ around.
But although they are bad science, they have survived because they feel true.
I’ve sat through several lectures over the years, where someone asserts that people learn:
Don’t believe this.
In one place, I found it reported with much more plausible scientific precision: 9%, 17.5%, 31%, etc. Don’t believe this either.
Some years ago I saw these figures stated authoritatively on a BBC web page, even attributing it to ‘recent research’, so I wrote to ask for the citation. They replied that they had got it from the British Dyslexia Association, so I wrote to them. They in turn replied that they had read it somewhere, but they hadn’t got a source.
Hunting for the source, I eventually came across Michael Molenda of Indiana University, who was on a similar hunt. He eventually co-wrote a paper with his findings.1
He traced it to Edgar Dale’s ‘cone of experience’, published in the late 40s.2 Dale used a schematic diagram (below) to illustrate his view that increasing richness of experience would lead to greater learning. But it was just illustrative of the principle – he never claimed it was data.
Somewhere along the way, someone has treated it as a graph and added the figures, and these have been repeated endlessly ever since, deeply embedded in the wisdom of teaching. As Deepak Subramony2 writes:
Because the corrupted cone has flared up in the literature of different fields, we tend to see a variety of firefighters trying to beat back the brush fires in their own particular fields, including teacher education, engineering education, and educational technology.
But... it seems unlikely that a quotation like this would have survived for so long unless there is some truth in it – in other words, it chimes with people’s experience in some way, just as a saying such as ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ does. Perhaps this is just a modern version of a proverb – it’s just that these days we demand proof.
Charles Fadel3 looked into the evidence that actually does exist, and produced a useful meta review of the original cones saga, and also of research that does exist about multimodal teaching.
The percentages related to the cone of learning were a simplistic attempt to explain very complex phenomenon. The reality is that the most effective designs for learning adapt to include a variety of media, combinations of modalities, levels of interactivity, learner characteristics, and pedagogy based on a complex set of circumstances.
1. Deepak Prem Subramony, Michael Molenda, Anthony K. Betrus and Will Thalheimer ( 2014) Previous Attempts to Debunk the Mythical Retention Chart and Corrupted Dale’s Cone, Educational Technology, Vol. 54, No. 6, pp. 17-21
2. Edgar Dale (1946). Audio-visual methods in teaching. New York: Dryden.
3. Charles Fadel (2008) Multimodal Learning Through Media: What the Research Says. Available from Researchgate [accessed Feb 20 2025].