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Society for College Science Teachers: Revisiting the Cone of Learning—Is it a Reliable Way to Link Instruction Method with Knowledge Recall?

Journal of College Science Teaching—November/December 2007

In his article, Dale had constructed a tiered triangle to rank students’ ability to recall information that had been taught six weeks earlier (Dale 1969). Dale had found that only 5% of the knowledge gained through lecture was remembered by students several weeks after it was heard. Dale’s original tool for ranking student learning has evolved into a three-dimensional, sequentially-tiered triangle known as the cone of learning. The author put the cone of learning findings to the test with his nonscience majors using a simple, five-piece puzzle that, when correctly completed, would form a square. All of the instructional methods were tiers on the cone of learning and all had been documented in the science education literature read earlier. The outcome of the activity followed the one done by Dale several decades before. In both situations, the more active students were involved in the lesson, the more successful they were in learning the information.
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