ONLINE ASSIGNMENT 02 -Edger Dale's Cone of Experience

                   INTRODUCTION

EDGER DALE (April 27, 1900 March 8, 1985)

 Edgar Dale was born on April 27, 1900 in Benson, Minnesota. He received a B.A. and M.A. from the University of North Dakota and a Ph.D from the University of Chicago. His doctoral thesis was titled "Factual Basis for Curriculum Revision in Arithmetic with Special Reference to Children's Understanding of Business Terms." 

From 1921 to 1924, Dale was a teacher and the superintendent of schools in Webster, North Dakota. In 1924, he became a teacher at junior high school in Winnetka, Illinois, where he stayed until 1926. In 1928, Dale's interest in film led to a position with Eastman Kodak as a member of the editorial staff of Eastman Teaching Films in Rochester, New York for one year. 

In 1933, Dale wrote a paper on how to effectively create a high school film appreciation class. This paper has been noted for having a very different view of adolescent interaction with films than that taken by the Film Control Boards of the time. Dale died March 8, 1985 in Columbus, Ohio.

DALE'S CONE OF EXPERIENCE

In 1946, Dale introduced the Cone of Experience concept in a textbook on audiovisual methods in teaching. He revised it for a second printing in 1954 and again in 1969.

Dale's "Cone of Experience," which he intended to provide an intuitive model of the concreteness of various kinds of audiovisual media, has been widely misrepresented. Often referred to as the "Cone of Learning," it purports to inform viewers of how much people remember based on how they encounter information.

However, Dale included no numbers and did not base his cone on scientific research, and he also warned readers not to take the cone too seriously. The numbers originated from 1967, when a Mobil oil company employee, D.G. Treichler, published a non-scholarly article in Film and Audio-Visual Communications.

In moving toward the pinnacle of the Cone from direct, purposeful experiences to verbal symbols, the degree of abstraction gradually increases. As a result, learners become spectators rather than participants (Seels, 1997). The bottom of the Cone represented “purposeful experience that is seen, handled, tasted, touched, felt, and smelled” (Dale, 1954, p. 42). By contrast, at the top of the Cone, verbal symbols (i.e., words) and messages are highly abstract. They do not have physical resemblance to the objects or ideas. As Dale (1969) wrote, “The word horse as we write it does not look like a horse or sound like a horse or feel like a horse” (p. 127).

THE LEVELS OF CONE OF EXPERIENCE

ENACTIVE - DIRECT EXPERIENCE

• Direct Purpose
• Contrived
• Dramatized

ICONIC – Pictorial Experience

• Demonstration
• Field Trips
• Exhibits
• Educational Television
• Motion Pictures
• Recordings, Radio, Still Pictures

SYMBOLIC – Highly Abstract Experiences

• Visual Symbols
• Verbal Symbols

THE CATEGORIES OF EDGER DALES CONE OF EXPERIENCE

DIRECT  PURPOSEFUL  EXPERIENCE

• Direct – What is seen, handled, tasted, felt, touched and smelt i.e., experiences gained through our senses- firsthand experiences. All the senses are used.
• Purposeful – Not mechanical or mere sensory excitement, should serve some purpose and experiences are to be internalized.
• Experience- a ounce of experience is better than a tone of theory.

EXAMPLE : The teacher arranges a class in the language laboratory. Students get direct experience while using a language  laboratory.

CONTRIVED EXPERIENCE

• Models or Mock-ups
• Editing of reality – differs from the original either in size or complexity.
• Real things might be too much or too minute or concealed or confused or complicated to be perceive directly.
• In such cases this limitation is preferred for better and easier understanding.

EXAMPLE : The teacher presents a model of Shakesperian theatre or Globe theatre.

DRAMATIZED EXPERIENCES

• Reconstructed experiences
• Representation of real past events.
• Can be used to simplify an event or idea to its most important parts
• Different forms of dramas are play, pageant pantomime, tableau, puppets etc.

EXAMPLE : The ask students to conduct a play of William Shakespeare.

DEMONSTRATION

• Visualized explanation of an important fact, idea, or process
• Shows how certain things are done
• Complicated processes are performed by the teacher
• Students are passive observers

EXAMPLE :  The teacher demonstrates the using of equipments in the language laboratory.

FIELD TRIPS

• Watch people do things in real situations
• Observe an event that is unavailable in the classroom
• It helps in the utilization of community resources.
• They provide first hand experiences for the students.

EXAMPLE : The teacher conducts a field trip to an art gallery and museum.

EXHIBITS

• Exhibits are concrete representation of things. Something seen by a spectator.
• This include exhibits, museums, specimens etc.
• It brings the outside world into the classroom.

EXAMPLE : The teacher  and students conduct a exhibition of elements of language.

MOTION PICTURES

• Can omit unnecessary or unimportant material
• Used to slow down a fast process
• Viewing and hearing experience .It utilizes multi-sensory approach.
• Can re-create events with simplistic drama that even slower students can grasp.
• Motion pictures if carefully prepared using both audio and visuals together can be very much effective.

EXAMPLE : The teacher shows the movie adaptation of Julius Caeser.

https://youtu.be/4nT6ifKkhrY

EDUCATIONAL TELEVISION

• An important educational tool that bring immediate interaction with events from around the world.
• Live telecast brings the real event as it actually happens.
• The outcome of TV telecast is unknown. It only unfolds as we see it. It is history in the making.
• Edit an event to create clearer understanding than if experienced the actual event first hand

EXAMPLE : The teacher asked students to watch the telecast of the poem ‘Tajmahal’ written by Rabindranath Tagore in KITE VICTORS educational channel. https://youtu.be/WOGNJ11PaWA

RECORDINGS, RADIO and STILL PICTURES

• Radio is means of one-way communication.
• Can be used by those who cannot read
• Helpful to students who cannot deal with the motion or pace of a real event or television.
• Recordings can be more useful as they can be played and replayed and also obtain students observation and reactions
• Still pictures include slides, pictures, illustrations, filmstrips etc.
• Still pictures can be projected.

EXAMPLES : The teacher plays the recorded voice summary  of the poem Daffodils by William Wordsworth.

The teacher shows the still picture of daffodil flowers.

Daffodil flower

VISUAL SYMBOLS

• This includes maps, chart, diagrams, graphs, cartoons etc.
• Help students see an idea, event, or process
• If properly employed can promote more interest and better understanding.

EXAMPLE : The  teacher shows the character map of the play Julius Caeser (Act 2).

Character flow chart

VERBAL SYMBOLS

• This is chalk and talk method
• Two types – Written words and Spoken words
• Thinking is given more importance.
• No resemblance to the object for which it stands.

EXAMPLE : The teacher writes some of  the common  character names of Shakespearian plays and give explanations about its relevance.

CONCLUSION

When Dale researched learning and teaching methods he found that much of what we found to be true of direct and indirect (and of concrete and abstract) experience could be summarised in a pyramid or ‘pictorial device’. He stated that the cone was not offered as a perfect or mechanically flawless picture to be taken absolutely literally. It was merely designed as a visual aid to help explain the interrelationships of the various types of audio-visual materials, as well as their individual ‘positions’ in the learning process.

 It is important to note that Dale never intended the Cone to depict a value judgment of experiences; in other words, his argument was not that more concrete experiences were better than more abstract ones. Dale believed that any and all of the approaches could and should be used, depending on the needs of the learner.

Dr. Bilash Bio argues that the figure above shows what students will be able to do at each level of the Cone (the learning outcomes they will be able to achieve) relative to the type of activity they are doing (reading, hearing, viewing images, etc.). The numerical figures on the left side of the image, what people will generally remember indicate that practical, hands-on experience in a real-life context will allow students to remember best what they do. Again, it is important to remember that this doesn’t mean reading and listening are not valuable learning experiences, simply that “doing the real thing” can lead to the retention of the largest amount of information. This is in part because those experiences near the bottom of the Cone, closer to and including real-world experiences, make use of more of our senses; it is believed that the more senses that are used, the greater our ability to learn from and remember an event or experience

REFERANCE

http://www.etsu.edu/uged/etsu1000/documents/Dales_Cone_of_Experience.pdf

Dale, Edgar.  Audio-Visual Methods in Teaching, 3rd ed.,  Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York, 1969, p. 108

i/Edgar_Dhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wikale