Friday, October 31st, 2008
Charles is the head of Education at CISCO.
That means K – 12 and Higher/Further Education. He presented some research that CISCO had commissioned on learning effectiveness, debunking the enduring myth that you retain more, the more active and multi-sensed your learning.
Apparently the Edgar Dale’s Cone of Learning
on which this was all based was -in its original publication- merely a visual metaphor, not a heirachy, and certainly no percentage of retention was attached.
What Fadel’s research seems to suggest is that in multi-modal learning, non-interactive material works better for basic skill development. Only in higer order skill development does interactive multi-modal learning come to the fore.
The figures are: multimodal learning of basic skills: non-interactive retention is 21% and interactive 9%. With higher order skills the figures are non-interactive 20%, and interactive: 32%.