Tag Archives: anchoring

Dale’s Cone of Learning figures debunked

By Paul | Published: March 3, 2010
Edgar Dale was a US educationist and professor of educations at Ohio State University. In 1946 he developed his most famous model, the cone of learning.Since then it has been quoted frequently, far and wide as the definitive evidence for how we retain information when delivered in various styles and mediums and has informed how to design training courses in specific ways. This is unfortunate, because the figures we associate with the model are meaningless. In this post, Paul explains why and encourages to be careful when sharing 'facts' with others.
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Recall: It’s a bit like opening a document

By Paul | Published: December 13, 2009
Our understanding of how the brain stores and retrieves data is still in the early stages of development. What is clear though, is that the result of learning (memory?) is stored in many places in the brain. Rather than being a problem, this provides us with many ways of accessing memory when we want to [...]
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Bleeding ears, nervousness and a paddling duck

By Paul | Published: November 12, 2009
In this third installment of music week, Paul shares his experience of stage fright before performing at the Marquee club in London and reflects on the nervousness we sometimes feel in the training room. He explains a great way of managing our state through "centering".
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One, two, three times embedded

By Paul | Published: November 1, 2009
We love quizzes. We use them all over the place but in today’s slightly shorter post I wanted to share one of our favourites because it works on so many levels. We know that quizzes are a great way to embed learning but why stop at one way when you could get three ways in one quiz? Here’s [...]
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As Debbie Harry would say: “Picture this”

By Paul | Published: October 13, 2009
During the late 1990s I was working as an internal consultant for a large American organisation implementing lean manufacturing into a number of our European factories. One of the concepts we were working on was the “visual workplace” Wherever possible, this involved removing reams of work instructions and procedural manuals and replacing them with flow charts and [...]
Posted in Practice | Also tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments