CHAPTER V: 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. The different kinds of sensory aid often overlap and sometimes blend into one another. Motion pictures can be sometimes blend into one another. Motion pictures can be combine into sight or sound. students may merely view a demonstration or they may view it, then participate. As a visible leader in audiovisual education, Dale and his work had a great deal of authority within the field. The Cone may be regarded as the earliest highly influential conceptual schema in the field. The Cone of Experience was historically important in its attempt to connect psychological/instructional theory and communications media. While the direct to vicarious and purely symbolic experience continuum is still valid, the cone is dated in its description of media. The cone was introduced in a different time period when there were fewer theories and those that existed were used more uniformly. Today, there is no widely accepted theory which follows in the tradition of the Cone of Experience, and the result is a gap in instructional design theory. New directions in theory worth pursuing in order to close the gap include: more specialized models; new ways to test models; models which combine design, development, and evaluation; and message design theory which relates types of learning and other variables.