Here’s an activity I do in most of my workshops:
Sort the approaches to teaching according to the percentage of recall that could be expected of students 24 hours after being taught.
When you’re ready, click here for the answers.
I first read about the Learning Pyramid in brain researcher David Sousa’s book, How the Brain Learns (2006). The pyramid, which Sousa says comes from the National Training Lab, illustrates the percentage of student recall that is associated with various teaching approaches. Recall is lower for lectures than for any other instructional approach because lectures leave students as passive consumers of information so rehearsal of that information is at a rote level as the student transfers the teacher’s words to written notes. Retention improves when students are presented with information in both verbal and visual forms and when students are more actively involved in the learning.
Sousa’s explanation makes sense to me, as it does to most of the teachers I’ve worked with. Recently, however, I’ve come across several sites dismissing the Learning Pyramid as bad research at best, and a hoax at worst. See, for example, this site. The arguments against the learning pyramid are as follows:
1. The National Training Lab can’t find the evidence that was used in the early 1960’s creation of the pyramid.
2. Dale’s Cone of Experience developed in 1946 seems to be an earlier version of the pyramid but it didn’t have any numbers and Dale warned readers not to take it too literally.
3. The numbers are suspicious because they are all factors of 10. Accurate research results are messier than that.
4. Teaching is a highly contextualized set of activities so any suggestions that one way is better than another are suspect. Some methods will work better in some situations than others.
In his blog, David Jones maintains that the learning pyramid still gets a lot of play with educators because we have a confirmation bias (we believe information that supports our preconceptions), and because we are looking for silver bullet answers to complex situations. Jones asserts that the learning pyramid is “destructive…providing a simplistic and wrong basis on which to guide design, when such design should be guided by and engage with a recognition that teaching is complex, difficult and contextual and can’t be improved by silver bullets.”
Respectfully, Mr. Jones, I couldn’t disagree more. I do agree that teaching is highly contextualized and there are no silver bullets. But I don’t think you are giving teachers much credit if you think that’s how they are interpreting the pyramid. The teachers I work with are much smarter than that. They think the pyramid supports the idea that active forms of learning are better than passive ones. In that belief they are in good company – everyone from John Dewey, to brain researchers such as David Sousa and John Medina, to constructivism theorists such as Jacqueline Grennon Brooks. Here are several useful video clips about constructivism.
Even if the percentages are rounded off or downright wrong, it seems to me that dismissing the pyramid is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I believe the Learning Pyramid a useful intuitive model that explicates a truth teachers have known for a long time – the person engaged in the talking and the doing is the person engaged in the learning.
