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Learning Pyramid

The Learning Pyramid Quote

Students retain approximately 75% of what they learn when they practice by doing, compared to just 5% of what they hear in lectures and 10% of what they read.

That quote---sometimes called the "Learning Pyramid" or attributed to "Edgar Dale's Cone of Experience"---does not come from a verifiable, primary research study. In fact, it's considered apocryphal. While you'll see it widely repeated in teacher-training materials and on education websites, there is no recognized peer-reviewed source confirming that people retain "5% of what they hear in lectures, 10% of what they read, and 75% of what they practice by doing."

Where It Is Often (Incorrectly) Cited

  1. Edgar Dale's Cone of Experience (1946): Dale created a general visual model of how learners might engage with different types of media (e.g., verbal symbols, pictures, direct experiences), but he never attached fixed percentages of retention to these categories.
  2. National Training Laboratories (NTL) "Learning Pyramid": This version is often claimed to come from internal NTL research, but the organization itself has never produced an original data source or methodology supporting these exact numbers.

Scholarly Rebuttals

A few academic articles analyze the origins of these percentages and conclude that they are not based on any actual research. For example:

  • Letrud, K. A. (2012). "A Rebuttal of NTL's Learning Pyramid or the 'Cone of Learning.'" Education, 133(1), 117--124.
  • This paper explains that the purported retention rates can't be traced to a credible empirical study and appear to be a misunderstanding or misapplication of Dale's work.

Key Takeaway

If you need a verified source for how students learn best or how retention rates differ by instructional method, it's best to refer to peer-reviewed cognitive science or educational psychology research (e.g., studies on retrieval practice, spaced repetition, active learning). The specific "5%, 10%, 75%" figures have no solid evidence behind them.

In short, there is no legitimate citation for the exact 5%-10%-75% quote because it has never been validated in a research study. It is often attributed to Dale or NTL, but neither can provide original data or a publication to support it. If you see those numbers repeated, know that they are anecdotal claims rather than empirically proven statistics.

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