Visual Turn

What’s wrong with this picture?

(Source: rizkyselma, via world-shaker)

However neat and tidy this image may be, we really need to put this sorry old chestnut to rest, and remind ourselves of the dangers inherent in citing secondary sources.

Will Thalheimer (2006) published a rather detailed and well-cited debunking of this oft-repeated learning myth. Thalheimer traced the concept to Dale’s Cone of Experience (1946), pointing out that Dale’s image contained no percentages. The percentages came from D.G. Treichler (1967), an oil company employee writing in a magazine about audio-visual communications, but without citing any research as a basis for the percentages. An organization called NTL Institute claims to have developed the Learning Pyramid in the early 1960s. Thalheimer presents one graph that includes a citation, but the cited article contains no such graph or percentages (meaning the citation was in error, or fraudulent). Thalheimer confirmed this with the author of the article the graph cited.

A report commissioned by Cisco from the Metiri Group (2008) goes into further detail. The report provides evidence of how this myth has been widely perpetuated — and manipulated — in the fields of education and training for several decades, despite the complete absence of empirical evidence supporting it. The report then goes on to summarize genuine research into multimodal learning, deriving information from fourteen published scholarly articles (based on twenty-three studies and meta-studies that together surveyed almost 6,000 students) to determine the best practices for multimodal teaching, whether or not it includes technology.

If you need any further evidence, try a Google image search for “Dale’s Cone of Experience” to see how these images endlessly ricochet around the web when a “reblog” is just a click away. If we see it repeated often enough, from otherwise reputable web sites for educators, why shouldn’t we take it as gospel? Limit your search to college and university web site (add “site:edu” to your search), and you may see that the echo is as loud in education as elsewhere. 

One of the reasons this information has been endlessly repeated is that it “feels right.” It seems to fit rather intuitively with our perceived experiences, and meshes nicely with the preference many of us have (myself included) regarding active and experiential learning through multiple modalities. Somewhere along the way someone slapped some numbers on it, and suddenly it became credible, citable science. I can only wonder how many theses, dissertations, and peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals include this bogus information among their references, dutifully quoting a secondary source without ever checking the facts.

Ironically, this myth-busting does more than refute an old canard. It actually illuminates a very real research-based finding about learning: it is very much harder tounlearn something than to learn it correctly in the first place. Our brains, once “wired” into a familiar pattern, find it much easier to recognize and repeat the same pattern, and find it much harder to “rewire” to change the original pattern. Automaticity in learning has enormous benefits that allow the non-conscious aspects of our minds to repeat familiar patterns without taxing the precious resource of conscious thought. Yet that same automaticity can mask our perceptions and prevent us from even recognizing that the pattern we are repeating has little basis in reality.

Perhaps the bottom level of the Learning Cone should say, “People remember 100% of ideas that go unquestioned.”

Metiri Group, (2008). Multimodal learning through media: What the research says. http://www.cisco.com/web/strategy/docs/education/Multimodal-Learning-Through-Media.pdf

Thalheimer, W. (2006). People remember 10%, 20% … oh, really? Will at Work Learning. http://www.willatworklearning.com/2006/05/people_remember.html

— Visual Turn