The Unused PotentialIt can be stated, with practically no qualification, that people in general do not know how to listen. They have ears that hear very well, but seldom have they acquired the necessary aural skills which would allow those ears to be used effectively for what is called listening. For several years we have been testing the ability of people to understand and remember what they hear. At the University of Minnesota we examined the listening ability of several thousand students and of hundreds of business and professional people. In each case the person tested listened to short talks by faculty members and was examined for his grasp of the content. These extensive tests led us to this general conclusion: immediately after the average person has listened to someone talk, he remembers only about half of what he has heard—no matter how carefully he thought he was listening. What happens as time passes? Our own testing shows—and it has been substantiated by reports of research at Florida State University and Michigan State University1—that two months after listening to a talk, the average listener will remember only about 25% of what was said. In fact, after we have barely learned something, we tend to forget from one-half to one-third of it within eight hours; it is startling to realize that frequently we forget more in this first short interval than we do in the next six months. Gap in TrainingBehind this widespread inability to listen lies, in our opinion, a major oversight in our system of classroom instruction. We have focused attention on reading, considering it the primary medium by which we learn, and we have practically forgotten the art of listening. About six years are devoted to formal reading instruction in our school systems. Little emphasis is placed on speaking, and almost no attention has been given to the skill of listening, strange as this may be in view of the fact that so much lecturing is done in college. Listening training—if it could be called training—has often consisted merely of a series of admonitions extending from the first grade through college: “Pay attention!” “Now get this!” “Open your ears!” “Listen!” Certainly our teachers feel the need for good listening. Why then have so many years passed without educators developing formal methods of teaching students to listen? We have been faced with several false assumptions which have blocked the teaching of listening. For example: (1) We have assumed that listening ability depends largely on intelligence, that “bright” people listen well, and “dull” ones poorly. There is no denying that low intelligence has something to do with inability to listen, but we have greatly exaggerated its importance. A poor listener is not necessarily an unintelligent person. To be good listeners we must apply certain skills that are acquired through either experience or training. If a person has not acquired these listening skills, his ability to understand and retain what he hears will be low. This can happen to people with both high and low levels of intelligence. (2) We have assumed that learning to read will automatically teach one to listen. While some of the skills attained through reading apply to listening, the assumption is far from completely valid. Listening is a different activity from reading and requires different skills. Research has shown that reading and listening skills do not improve at the same rate when only reading is taught. This means that in our schools, where little attention is paid to the aural element of communication, reading ability is continually upgraded while listening ability, left to falter along on its own, actually degenerates. As a fair reader and a bad listener, the typical student is graduated into a society where the chances are high that he will have to listen about three times as much as he reads. This article also appears in:The barriers to listening training that have been built up by such false assumptions are coming down. Educators are realizing that listening is a skill that can be taught. In Nashville, for example, the public school system has started training in listening from elementary grades through high school. Listening is also taught in the Phoenix school system, in Cincinnati, and throughout the state of North Dakota. About two dozen major universities and colleges in the country now provide courses in listening. At the University of Minnesota we have been presenting a course in listening to a large segment of the freshman class. Each group of students that has taken listening training has improved at least 25% in ability to understand the spoken word. Some of the groups have improved as much as 40%. We have also given a course in listening for adult education classes made up mostly of business and professional people. These people have made some of the highest gains in listening ability of any that we have seen. During one period, 60 men and women nearly doubled their listening test scores after working together on this skill one night a week for 17 weeks. Listening There are three modes of listening: competitive, passive and active. Active listening is considered the most effective because the listener is not only listening with interest, but actively acknowledging listening by brief responses. Most individuals are not as skilled at listening as they think. Depending on the study, listeners likely remember 25 to 50 percent of what they hear, according to Mindtools. Giving the speaker your undivided attention and not focusing on what you are going to say in response while he is talking is a good way to ensure you hear more of what is being said. Debunk This: People Remember 10 Percent of What They ReadBy Will Thalheimer Thursday, March 12, 2015 Advertisement 3 Comments Bookmark Main Site Sign in Page Don't have an ATD account? Don't have an ATD account? Forgot your Password? Already an ATD customer without a web account? Institutional subscriber? Click here to sign in. Share Learning is infinitely complex. I contend that it is much more complex than rocket science. Human cognition is an amalgam of multiple systems and twisted interconnections. Even today’s neuroscientists struggle to fully map our cognitive architecture. As James D. Watson said: “The brain is the last and grandest biological frontier, the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe. It contains hundreds of billions of cells interlinked through trillions of connections. The brain boggles the mind.” Fortunately, wisdom has come down through the ages, from Aristotle to Pliny the Elder to Sophocles to Confucius, and so on. What’s the percentage of information do we retain? This wisdom can be best summarized as that people remember:
This is wisdom that we, as learning professionals, ought to integrate into our learning designs. Unfortunately, the complexities are daunting. I will attempt to disambiguate recommendations here, based on current understandings of brain science. First, it’s helpful to review to Edgar Dale’s elegant recommendations based on the visual metaphor of a cone. Dale, working in the 1940s, anticipated the findings of neuroscience decades before functional magnetic imaging techniques made brain science possible. Note that clear recommendations are evident in the cone. If we want our learners to learn the most, long-term, we should have them “design/perform a presentation.” Or more succinctly, they should “do the real thing.” While this may seem confusing at first, its wisdom is undeniable. Learning professionals should also help people “say and write” by having them “participate in hands-on-workshops.” Again, if this seems confusing, ignore your skepticism and accept the wisdom, because neuroscientists are simply smarter than me and you. Finally, a note on audio visual content, it’s much more valuable to “watch a demonstration” rather than “watch videos,” especially if there are cute cats in those videos. It seems that Edgar Dale even anticipated YouTube. Indeed, many believe that Dale and his learning methods were simply amazing. Some have even said that he was the Buddha, reincarnated. But I digress… The Zen of Learning Advertisement Did you know that if someone mentions scientific verbiage, that you’re more likely to believe them? Yes, there’s even research on this! Let me tell you the truth: almost everything I’ve written in this post up to this point is false! Erase it from your mind. Unfortunately, the information above is regularly conveyed within the learning field—as if it were immutable truth from the ancients or undeniable truth from the latest in neuroscience. If you found yourself believing while reading the words above in this blog post, you’re not alone. Most of us, it seems, are suckers for this kind of misinformation. In a series of articles in the most recent edition of the journal Educational Technology, I and three fellow researchers explored how this misinformation has been passed down over time. You can read my full synopsis of the research articles on my blog, but let me briefly outline the findings here: There is no scientific evidence to back up the percent-remembering numbers. Indeed, anybody who knows anything about research would know that results that round to numbers ending with a zero or a five are simply not credible. More importantly, the numbers directly contradict much of what the real scientific research tells us about learning. People do not necessarily remember more of what they hear than what they read. They do not necessarily remember more of what they see and hear than what they see. The numbers are nonsense and the order of potency is incorrect as well. Indeed, actual research on human learning shows that human beings are highly variable in how much they remember. My collaborators—and I must say the others did most of the historical legwork—found the first mention of the percent-remembering numbers from 1914 and 1922. In those publications the numbers were characterized as findings that were long known, but no specific research was cited. It’s really a rather fascinating case study of how misinformation flows from person to person, from publication to publication. Indeed, we found at least eight publications commonly cited as the place where the research on the percentages could be viewed in its elemental form. In NONE of these publications was any research described! Advertisement Just as critical, Dale didn’t intend his cone, also called pyramid of learning, to be prescriptive. That is, he didn’t want us to use his cone to make instructional-design decisions. He created his cone as a descriptive model, attempting to capture what the learning landscape was like back in 1946. What You Can Do The most important thing we can do as professionals is to be skeptical when we encounter “research” or evidence. With a healthy dose of skepticism, we’re less likely to be infected with misinformation. In addition, we need to stand up for the professionalism in our field by gently pushing back against the bad information—and those who convey it. Check out The Debunker Club to make such a commitment. Editor's Note: Source for the Dale Cone of Experience images ishttp://www.willatworklearning.com/myths_and_worse. Check out similar articles: Brain Rules: What Science Says About How We Learn This article was originally published in March 2015 and has since been updated with new information and resources. Education Adult Learning Certificate Harness the experience and self-direction of adult learners in all your development initiatives. Reach your adult learners where they are with best practices and proven techniques. Learn More About the Author Will Thalheimer Will Thalheimer is a learning expert, researcher, instructional designer, business strategist, speaker, and writer. He has worked in the learning and performance field since 1985. In 1998, Will founded Work-Learning Research to bridge the gap between research and practice, compile research on learning, and disseminate research findings to help chief learning officers, instructional designers, trainers, e-learning developers, performance consultants, and learning executives build more effective learning and performance interventions and environments. He speaks regularly at national and international conferences. Will holds a BA from the Pennsylvania State University, an MBA from Drexel University, and a PhD in educational psychology: human learning and cognition from Columbia University. 3 Comments Sign In to Post a Comment Sign In SR Srivatsan R December 31, 2021 08:10 AM Very well written article, Will! This is unfortunately a universal phenomenon in all fields. I guess in this case, it was so easy for people to believe because it intuitively makes sense. Sorry! Something went wrong on our end. Please try again later. AC Almudena Casas December 27, 2021 05:01 PM I have really enjoyed your article Will - I have become a fan of the way you write! Thank you A. Sorry! Something went wrong on our end. Please try again later. Tara Tetzlaff November 26, 2018 10:07 AM Thank you for writing about this. When I started in Learning & Development, I was surprised by how often these types of axioms are referenced without any research or evidence. As I looked into them for myself, I was shocked to realize there is no research or evidence. Hopefully as we continue to develop our understanding of the science of learning, this model and others like it will be phased out of the literature. Sorry! Something went wrong on our end. Please try again later. Hide Comments View Comments Sorry! Something went wrong on our end. Please try again later. AttentionWe know now that attention is the fundamental difference between hearing and listening. Paying attention to what a speaker is saying requires intentional effort on your part. Nichols, credited with first researching the field of listening, observed, “listening is hard work. It is characterized by faster heart action, quicker circulation of the blood, a small rise in bodily temperature.”[1] Consider that we can process information four times faster than a person speaks. Yet, tests of listening comprehension show the average person listening at only 25% efficiency. A typical person can speak 125 words-per-minute, yet we can process up to three times faster, reaching as much as 500 words-per-minute. The poor listener grows impatient, while the effective listener uses the extra processing time to process the speaker’s words, distinguish key points, and mentally summarize them.[2] Hoppe[3] advises active listening is really a state of mind requiring us to choose to focus on the moment, being present and attentive while disregarding any of our anxieties of the day. He suggests listeners prepare themselves for active attention by creating a listening reminder. This might be to write “Listen” at the top of a page in front of you in a meeting. While reading a book, or having a discussion with an individual, you can go back and reread or ask a question to clarify a point. This is not always true when listening. Listening is of the moment, and we often only get to hear the speaker’s words once. The key then is for the listener to quickly ascertain the speaker’s central premise or controlling idea. Once this is done, it becomes easier for the listener to discern what is most important. Of course, distinguishing the speaker’s primary goal, his main points, and the structure of the speech are all easier when the listener is able to listen with an open mind. “American Government class lecture” by United States Navy. Public domain. |
