Classifying Instructional Materials

Who is Edgar Dale?

Born April 17, 1900, Benson, Minnesota, USA

Cited as the Father of Modern Audiovisual Education

An American Educationalist who developed the Cone of Experience.

Professor of Education at Ohio State University

“The cone is a visual analogy, and like all analogies, it does not bear an exact and detailed relationship to the complex elements it represents.”

What is the Cone of Experience?

The cone of experience consists of bands which arrange media used in learning experience from the most concrete to the most abstract.

Some students focus mostly on concrete (sensory) experience.

Others prefer to think about abstract concepts and theories.

The pattern of arrangement of the bands of experience is not difficulty but degree of abstraction.

The individual bands of the Cone of Experience stand for experience that are fluid, extensive and continually interact.

In our teaching then, we do not always begin with direct experience at the base of the cone rather we begin with the kind of experience that is most appropriate to the needs and abilities of particular learner in a particular learning  situation. Then of course, we vary this experience with many other types of learning activities.

                                                                                     -Dale 1969

Who is Jerome Bruner?

American Psychologist 

Born October 1, 1915, New York, USA

Devised another classification of media parallel to Dale’s called Three-Fold Analysis of Experience or Three-Tiered Model of Learning.

The ENACTIVE part forms the bases of all learning experience and it refers to the direct or actual experiences.

The ICONIC part refers to abstract experiences in the form of pictures.

The SYMBOLIC part represents the forming of mental image in the absence of concrete object.

Charles Hoban, Charles Hoban Jr. and Samuel Zisman

A conceptual graph in which visual media are arranged along the y axis while the learner’s level of development-from the concrete level of thinking to the abstract level of thinking is array along the x axis.

Implications of the Cone of Experience in the teaching-learning process

• We do not use only one medium of communication in isolation. Rather we use many instructional materials to help the learner conceptualize his/her experience
• We avoid teaching directly at the symbolic level of thought without adequate foundation of the concrete. Leaner’s concepts will lack of deep roots in direct experience. Dale caution us when he said: “these rootless experiences will not have the generative power to produce additional concepts and will not be able learner to deal with the new situation that he faces.
• When teaching, we don’t get stuck in the concrete. Let us strive to bring our students to the symbolic or abstract level to develop their higher order thinking skills.

Reference: Educational Technology 1 by Lucido and Corpuz