Lesson 5 - The Cone of Experience

The Cone of Experience

The Cone of Experience is a visual model, a pictorial device that presents bands of experience arranged according to degree of abstraction and not degree of difficulty. Dale fyurther explains that “the individual bands of the cone of experience  stand for experience that are fluid, extensive and continually internet”.

• Direct Purposeful Experience-serve as the foundation of our learning.
• Contrived Experience- use for representative models or mock ups of reality for practical reasons.
• Dramatized Experience- participate  in a reconstructed experience .
• Demonstrations- is a visualized explanation of an important fact, idea, or process.
• Study trips- there are the educational trips that observe an event that is unavailable within the classroom.
• Exhibits- these are displays to be seen byu spectators. Sometimes exhibits are “for your eyes only”.
• Television and Motion Pictures- reconstruct the reality of the past effectively yhat we are made to feel we are there.
• Still Pictures, Recordings, Radio- these are visual and auditory devices which may be used by an individual or group.
• Visyual Symbols- these are highly abstract representations, such as: charts, graphs and etc.
• Verbal Symbols- these are the written words, it may be a word for a concrete object.

           

            Harvard Psychologist, Jerome  S. Bruner presents a three-tiered model of learning where he points out that every area of knowledge can be presented and learned in a three distinct steps:

• Symbolic (through a series of symbols) 
• Iconic (through a series of Illustrations)
• Enactive (through a sequence of actions)

It is highly recommended that a learner proceeds from the ENACTIVE to the ICONIC and only after the SYMBOLIC. The mind is often shocked into immediate abstraction at the highest level without the benefit of the gradual unfolding.