The Cone of Experience

8 M’s of Instruction

 Milieu: Learning Environment

 Matter: Content of Learning
 Method: Teaching-Learning Strategy
 *Material: Resources of Learning
 *Media: Communication in Teaching & Learning
 Motivation: Arousing and Sustaining Interest in Learning
 Mastery: Be-all and End-all of Learning
 Measurement: Getting Evidence of Learning
 1. Direct/Purposeful
Edgar Dale’s Cone of Verbal Experience
Experience Symbols (Learning by
Visual Symbols Doing)
Recordings Radio 2. Iconic Experience
Still Pictures (Learning through
Motion Pictures Observation)
Educational Television 3. Symbolic
Experience
Exhibits
(Learning through
Study Trips
Abstraction)

Demonstrations

Dramatized Experiences

Contrived Experiences
Direct Purposeful Experiences
Questions
Cone of Experience

 visual model, a pictorial device that presents the bands of

experience arranged according to degree of abstraction and
not degree of difficulty
 the further you go from the bottom of the cone, the more
abstract the experience becomes
1. Direct purposeful
experiences: learning by
doing; meaningful
information and ideas
through seeing, hearing,
touching, tasting, and
smelling

2. Contrived experiences: use

of a representative models or
mock up reality for practical
reasons
3. Dramatized experiences:
participate in a
reconstructive experience
even though original event is
far from us in time

4. Demonstrations: visualized
explanation of an important
fact, idea or processes by the
use of photographs, drawings,
films, displays, or guided
motions
5. Field trips: excursions,
educational trips and visits

6. Exhibits: displays to be
seen by spectators; working
models arranged
meaningfully

7. Motion pictures:
reconstruct the reality of the
past that we are made to feel
we are there; feeling of
realism
8. Still pictures (lack the
sound and motion of sound
film), Recordings, Radio
(broadcast of an actual
event)

9. Visual symbols: charts,

graphs, maps, diagrams

10. Verbal symbols: written

words; word for a concrete
object (book); idea; formula
Three pitfalls that teachers should avoid with
regard to the use of the Cone of Experience:

 using one medium in isolation

 moving to the abstract without an adequate foundation
of concrete experience
 getting stuck in the concrete without moving to the
abstract hampering the development of our student’s
higher thinking skills
Activity/Assignment

 Ifyou teach a lesson on the meaning of 1/2, 1/3

and ¼, how will you proceed if you follow the
pattern in Dale’s Cone of Experience beginning
with the concrete moving toward the abstract?