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 form the bottom of the cone, the more abstract experience become.

1. Direct purposeful experience

-   it is the first hand experience which serve as the foundation of our learning. It is learning by doing. 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 mocks up of reality for practical reasons.

3. Dramatized experiences

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

4. Demonstrations

-    it is a visualized explanation of an important fact, idea or process by the use of photographs, drawings, films, displays or guided motions.

5. Study trips

-  these are excursions, educational trips, and visits conducted to observe an event that is unavailable within the classroom.

6. Exhibits

-     there are displays to be seen by spectators. They may consist of working models arranged meaningfully or photographs with models, charts, and posters.

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, and radio

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

9. Visual symbols

-       these are no longer realistic reproduction of physical things for these are highly abstract representations. Examples are charts, graphs, maps, and diagrams.

10. Verbal symbols

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