Dale's Cone of Experience

One of the newsletters that I subscribe to is the Internet Tourbus, and in one of the latest editions, they talk about 'Dale's Cone of Experience.' This is the term for the generally accepted idea that people most of the time remember:

10% of what they read
20% of what they hear
30% of what they see
50% of what they hear and see
70% of what they say or write
90% of what they as they do a thing

Here's a picture of what this looks like.

This information is usually considered common knowledge. Most people have seen it forwarded in an email or something similar. I believed it to be true after hearing people say you only remember 10% of what you read...Although I have always found that I remember things I read on an inverse scale, where the percentage I remember is inversely proportional to how much I need to remember. If it's some interesting biography or true story, I could probably tell you all about it. However, if it's, say, a reading from a textbook for some class, just forget it!

So, basically, according to the folks over at Work-Learning Research, this information is bogus. They did extensive research, and even contacted the supposed original researchers who formulated these statements from data. One of the researchers denied these statements to be a part of the research.

The Internet Tourbus folks have stated it best:

"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."

The full report on this is here.