Lesson 5: The Cone of Experience

The Cone is a visual model, a pictorial device that presents bands of experience arranged according to degree of abstraction and not degree of difficulty. The farther you go from the bottom of the cone, the more abstraction the experience become.

1. Direct Purposeful Movement

First-hand experience which serves as a foundation of our learning. We build up our reservoir of meaningful information and ideas through seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling.

2. Contrived Experiences

In here, we make use of a representative models or mock ups of reality for practical reasons.

3. Dramatized Experience

By dramatization, we can participate in a reconstructed experience, even though the original event is far removed from us i time.

4. Demonstrations

It is visualized explanation of an important fact, idea or process by the use of photographs, drawing, films, display or guided motion.

5. Study Trips

These are the excursions, educational trips, and visit conducted to observe an event that is unavailable within the classroom

6. Exhibits

These are displays to be seen by specters. They may consist of working models arranged meaningfully or photographs with models, charts and posters. Sometimes exhibits are "for your eyes only".

7. Television and Motion Pictures

Television and motion pictures can reconstruct the reality of the past so effectively that we are made to feel we are there.

8. Still Pictures, Recordings, Radio

These are the visual and auditory devices which may be used by an individual or a group.

9.Verbal Symbols

These are no longer realistic reproduction of physical things for  these are highly abstract representations.

10. Verbal Symbols

They are not like an objects or ideas for which they stand. They usually do not contain visual clues their meaning.

Application

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

It is highly recommended that a learner proceeds from the ENACTIVE to the ICONIC and only after to the SYMBOLIC.

Three pitfalls that we should avoid with regard to the use of the Cone of Experience:

• Using one medium in isolation
• Moving to the abstract without an adequate foundation of concrete experience
• Getting stuck in the concrete without moving to the abstract hampering the development of our students' higher thinking skills.