I attended a lecture today on how to help Year 12’s pass their examinations. One of the slides that captured my attention was the Learning Pyramid. It says that the information retained by our learners is a function of the kind of learning experiences we provide. The percentage shows what is left in the brain after 2-3 weeks. It is very important that teachers take these to heart especially when designing instruction. As you can see in the pyramid, lectures or teacher talk has the least retention rate. I don’t know why most teachers still prefer it, really.
I searched the net for source of this Learning Pyramid. Everyone seemed to be sourcing it to the National Training Laboratories, Bethel, Maine. However, I did make my own original contribution to the learning pyramid – a learning task that has 100% retention rate. Mine is not based on empirical research but from my own experience. This is the reason I blog. And I highly recommend this as a method of teaching and delaying the onset of dementia.
Learning experience vs retention rate
You may also want to know another pyramid – Bloom’s Taxonomy for iPads.
This is a very interesting idea, and probably contains some nuggets of truth…. but I wonder if it’s really true as presented?
What evidence — in the form of randomized controlled trials — is there for it? I’ve seen several research papers which compare results between students taught by old-fashioned direct instruction, vs the currently-fashionable ‘constructivist’ method of self-discovery, which seem to show that the former method actually gets better results than the latter.
I’m skeptical about an assertion that seems to cover all ages, all subjects, and all levels of difficulty, and is furthermore presented as nice rounded-off percentages … it smacks of the sort of folk wisdom typified by the false or meaningless assertion that “we only use 10% of our brain”, or the myth of different learning styles.
So … can anyone cite any relevant scientific studies?.