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by ericHosick 5172 days ago
This is something I learned in my Grad. Cert. class when I started lecturing at a University (for a few years).

We retain:

5% from lecture.

10% from reading.

20% from audio-visual.

30% from demonstration.

50% from group discussion.

75% from practice.

90% from teaching.

(above copied from somewhere but there is a lot of information on this subject: John Biggs is a good source).

I would have students lecture classes for me (I would have them lecture to me the day before to make sure they had the lessons figured out).
2 comments
CognitiveLens 5172 days ago
The idea behind your claim is reasonably strong, but your numbers are so imaginary that they actually harm this discussion. There are no universal "rules for learning" like this. If there were, education research would have been wrapped up a long time ago.

Learning is an incredibly complex combination of content, medium, background, strategy, mental state, mental ability, and more, and it varies widely based on subject material. There appear to be some advantages for certain teaching strategies under certain conditions for particular populations, but there is very little research that clearly establishes a more generalizable trend.

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barik 5172 days ago
As another poster pointed out, I see these numbers and variants often cited, even in professional educational conferences. Perhaps that is because it so closely and cleanly matches our own personal intuition about teaching. Unfortunately, it turns out there is no scientific basis for the "Learning Pyramid". And please don't use (Sousa, 2001) as evidence, I have the book "How the Brain Learns" and it simply punts on the citation to yet another institution. As an instructor, I still believe the idea has general merit even if the numbers are basically made up, but let's not take it as dogma.

I've tried to find the original scientific research myself and have concluded that it does not exist. I'm not the only one who has come to this conclusion either. [1] I would love to be corrected on this matter though. These days, I tend to use the following instead, which also matches my intuition about learning:

http://xkcd.com/519/ :-)

[1] J. P. M. Lalley, “THE LEARNING PYRAMID: DOES IT POINT TEACHERS IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION?,” Education, vol. 128, no. 1, p. 64, Fall 2007.

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