The Metiri Group's report disputes the widely debated Cone of Experience theory, which says each of us learns 10 percent of what we read, 20 percent of what we hear, 30 percent of what we see, 50 percent of what we hear and see, 70 percent of what we say or write, and 90 percent of what we say as we do a thing. (The rampant misrepresentation of researcher Edgar Dale's valid model of classifying learning styles is discussed in this entry in the blog of educational consultant Will Thalheimer.) After an extensive search, the report's authors were unable to find any empirical evidence supporting this breakdown. Contrary to popular opinion, research shows that lessons in which students interact with material, rather than passively absorb it, are not always better.
Jeff Johnson on 20 Jul 08For hundreds of years verbal messages have been the primary means of explaining ideas to learners. Although verbal learning offers a powerful tool for humans, this book explores ways of going beyond the purely verbal. An alternative to purely verbal presentations is to use multimedia presentations in which people learn from both words and pictures--a situation the author calls multimedia learning. Multimedia encyclopedias have become the latest addition to students' reference tools, and the world wide web is full of messages that combine words and pictures. This book summarizes ten years of research aimed at realizing the promise of multimedia learning.