Evidence-based Education
Remembering 90% of What You Do?
You can forget the ‘learning pyramid’ edu-myth!
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People often hold flawed or inaccurate ideas about how learning works, and these can be spread through sloppy advice in schools.
Perhaps you have come across the idea that we remember 10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, 30% of what we see… etc. These numbers tend to appear in a pyramid-shaped or triangular diagram.
Here it is:
This model is often called the learning pyramid (or ‘Dale’s cone of experience’).
The upper and lower extremes of the diagram suggest that we will remember only 10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear… but 90% of what we do. As a memory researcher myself, I’m afraid this just isn’t true.
I’ve never come across a properly-controlled experiment which has found one study technique to be nine times as effective as another!
