Edgar Dale

Who was Edgar Dale?

Edgar Dale was an American educationist who developed the Cone of Experience. He made several contributions to audio and visual instruction, including a methodology for analyzing the content of motion pictures. Born and raised in North Dakota he received a B.A. and M.A. from the University of North Dakota and a Ph.D from the University of Chicago. His doctoral thesis was titled, "Factual Basis for Curriculum Revision in Arithmetic with Special Reference to Children's Understanding of Business Terms." and is pre-cursor for his later work with vocabulary and readability. He was a professor of education at Ohio State University.

In 1933 Dale wrote a paper on how to effectively create a High School film appreciation class. This paper has been noted for having a very different view of adolescent interaction with films than that taken by the Film Control Boards of the time.