Bales' Learning Pyramid

A learning pyramid to indicate how we best remember things. Both the content and figures are fabricated and do not resemble the original research. In 1946, Edgar Dale wrote a book about media in education, which was revised in 1954 and 1969. In this book, he proposed the cone of experience, summarizing different types of indirect learning and ordering them from concrete to abstract. At the bottom are firsthand experiences and at the top, for example, texts that are composed of symbols. Dale emphasized that the cone is a visual metaphor for learning experiences, in which various types of audiovisual material are arranged in order of increasing abstraction. This is based on one's own direct experiences. He warned against seeing the cone as a rigid classification. Over the years, this cone has evolved into the now well-known 'learning pyramid' (e.g., by David Sousa, 2005), which features didactic labels and figures or percentages that were never on the original cone. The pyramid is derived from the cone but is completely fabricated. Additionally, this is also not correct in terms of content: for example, there is no evidence that we remember something we hear worse than something we see, as this depends on various factors. We also believe something faster if there is an image with it (truthiness). In this case, this ironically also applies to the pyramid itself. That alone says nothing about the learning yield.