Have you ever wondered how to effectively learn something? How to remember something effectively instead of forgetting it 3 days later?

Well in today’s post I’ll be going over a concept introduced by Edgar Dale in 1969 as the Cone of Experience. I’ll be referencing to it as the Cone of Learning, which is basically the same thing.

This Cone of Learning helps us understand how we learn and gives us hints as to how we should utilise this to our advantage. At the end of this post I give you steps you can take to immediately improve your retention and learning abilities. Before we get to that, let’s understand what the Cone of Learning is about.

The Cone Of Learning

After 2 weeks, the amount of information you remember – depending on the kind of stimuli you used to acquire it – is  estimated as follows:

You remember 10 % of all you read. Be it news articles,  books, notes, text books you spent hours reading and re-reading to prepare for a test. That isn’t much. That makes me reconsider reading stuff over and over as an effective learning method.

You remember 20 % of all you hear. Something you heard on the radio, an audiobook, music.

You remember 30 % of all you see. We are visual beings. We constantly use our visual input to assess our environment and thus we tend to remember it better. This could be a landscape you saw. A face. Observing someone doing something.

You remember 50% of all you hear and see. This ties into watching movies, watching someone demonstrating something, watching a presentation, going to a talk, or a seminar, or course.

You remember 70% of what you say. This involves speaking with friends, giving a talk or expressing yourself and explaining things to someone.

You remember 90% of what you do and say. This means doing the thing, simulating an experience in your mind, giving a presentation. This is why we say doing something is such an important part of any learning process. You are actively engaging all your senses when you do something yourself. You have to think about it. It is more demanding cognitively than reading or just listening to something. In the end it is much more rewarding, because you learn it better and remember it better.

The first four parts of the cone all represent passive learning. You are simply reading, hearing, seeing or combining these different inputs. The last two, however, a more effective because they involve active learning. You have to actually do something; you have to think.

This is why reading something over and over generally leads to poor results. Whereas preparing questions and answering them, or explaining a concept or method to somebody generally forces you to reformulate the knowledge and helps you adapt it to what you know. You integrate the knowledge better. This is key to concepts such as active recall and spaced repetition.

I would argue that the percentages given in this cone are actually overestimations. I think we remember less that 50% of visual and auditory input when they are mixed together. After 2 weeks for example, I don’t think I recall 50% of a movie I watched. Sure I could recall a general sense of the story and timeline, the main characters, but saying that I remember 50% of the script would be really impressive, and quite improbable. That said when I watch a movie I do not have the intent of memorising it and remembering it. I seek to appreciate it and immerse myself in the experience the director has created.

Even if the percentages are not correct the underlying message is the same – you learn better if you combine audition and sight. As a general rule, we can safely deduce that the more senses you actively engage the more memorable something will be.

Thus when we want to learn something the best thing we can do is to actively engage as many senses as possible and take action by doing the work. We learn best by doing. That is why apprenticeships were so popular and effective back when books, recordings, movies and the internet weren’t so popular.

Practical Application

So, how are you going to implement this idea to improve your retention and learning?

• Take something you are learning right now, or want to learn.

• How you are learning it? Are you using passive learning or active learning?

• How can you make your learning process more active and engaging?

• Could you explain it to a friend? Could you  help a friend? Can you ask someone to ask you questions on the topic you are learning?

• Come up with at least 3 ideas and start implementing the one you find the easiest to apply right now.