As safety professionals, we typically spend a great deal of time training workers. However, the time we are given to conduct this training is shrinking; so we need to be SMART in how we develop our content AND deliver it. The “learning pyramid” has been around as long as I have been alive and it is very accurate. The earliest such representation is believed to originate in a 1954 book called Audio-Visual Methods in Teaching. A pyramid model was developed by the National Training Laboratories Institute in the early 1960s.
For more on training delivery methods…
Edgar Dale (April 27, 1900, in Benson, Minnesota, – March 8, 1985, in Columbus, Ohio) was an American educator who developed the Cone of Experience, also known as the Learning Pyramid. He made several contributions to audio and visual instruction, including a methodology for analyzing the content of motion pictures.
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.
An example of the false “cone of learning” attributed to Dale
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.[8] 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.
