The Pyramid of Learning by Williams and Shellenberger: the 5 levels, their origin and their limits

Pyramid of Learning: the top is the only level you can see

The Pyramid of Learning is a model designed in 1991 by occupational therapist Kathleen Taylor and special education teacher Maryann Trott, based on A. Jean Ayres's sensory integration theory, then popularized by occupational therapists Mary Sue Williams and Sherry Shellenberger in How Does Your Engine Run? (1996). It arranges twenty-two skills across five levels, from the central nervous system to cognition, each level resting on the ones beneath it.

Hello to you, the movement professional,

Type "learning pyramid" into a search engine and look at the images that come up. Two pyramids share the same name and tell two stories that have nothing to do with each other. The first lines up percentages: supposedly we retain 10% of what we read and 90% of what we teach others. The second rests on a base labeled "central nervous system," with boxes called vestibular, body schema or eye-hand coordination. We will come back to the first, which belongs to educational myth. The second changes the way you look at a child who cannot manage to write, or an athlete who cannot manage to integrate a technical instruction that is simple enough.

Where the Pyramid of Learning comes from: Taylor, Trott, Williams and Shellenberger

In France, people say "the Williams and Shellenberger pyramid." The name circulates everywhere, from occupational therapy courses to the leaflets handed to teachers. Yet the story starts five years before their book, with two other women.

The diagram was born in 1991. Kathleen Taylor is an occupational therapist, Maryann Trott a special education teacher, and both draw on the work of A. Jean Ayres, the American occupational therapist who built, in the 1960s and 1970s, the theory of sensory integration. In 1972, Ayres defined it as the neurological process that organizes sensations from the body and the environment, and that makes it possible to use the body effectively in that environment. Taylor and Trott turned this idea into an image: at a glance, a parent or a teacher understands that reading also depends on balance.

Mary Sue Williams and Sherry Shellenberger, two occupational therapists, then took up the pyramid in How Does Your Engine Run?. This manual accompanies the Alert Program, which they created to teach children to regulate their level of arousal, in class as in session. The 1996 edition circulated widely, and it is very likely through it that the diagram entered French-language training courses, with both their names stuck on it. To cite the source properly, one line is enough: pyramid by Taylor and Trott (1991), taken up by Williams and Shellenberger (1996).

To our knowledge, the pyramid comes out of no published study. Practitioners built it from their experience and an existing theory, as a working tool. It therefore reads as a practitioners' grid, and we will see further on what that changes for its use.

The diagram of the 5 levels of the Pyramid of Learning

The pyramid has five levels. The base, the central nervous system, fits in a single box; the four levels above it carry twenty-two skills: seven, six, six, then three. Development builds it from the bottom up, and it is described here in that order. In the field, you will rather read it starting from the top.

Each level rests on the ones beneath it. A fragile level often makes what is built above it more costly, without necessarily blocking it. This extra cost shows up at the top, as fatigue or as errors that always come back in the same places.

Level 1: the central nervous system, the foundation we forget

At the very bottom, a single box, the widest. The central nervous system includes the brain and the spinal cord, and the pyramid places it under everything else for a simple reason: no learning happens without it. Its maturation sets the frame. The night's sleep and the level of arousal of the moment then decide what the upper levels will be able to produce that day.

Williams and Shellenberger's work focuses precisely on this foundation. Their Alert Program starts from an image that children grasp immediately: the body works like an engine, running at high speed, at low speed or just right. When the engine races, the child cannot stay in their chair. At idle, they drift off at the back of the classroom, gazing into space. In both cases, we ask them for concentration when the adjustment is made far lower down.

You know the same scene in the athlete, under another name. The player who arrives after a four-hour night has the same muscles as the day before. His foundation, though, has dropped a notch, and his technical movements feel it well before muscular fatigue shows.

Level 2: the sensory systems, and why the body's senses come first

The second level contains seven systems, arranged in two rows. At the bottom, the three senses of the body: touch, the vestibular system and proprioception. Above, the outward-facing senses: sight, hearing, smell and taste.

This order comes straight from Ayres. For her, the senses that inform about the body itself are set up very early and serve as the basis for processing what arrives from afar. The vestibular system, housed in the inner ear, informs about head movements and the direction of gravity. Proprioception informs about the position and movement of body segments, and about the force the muscles produce. Touch also belongs to somatosensation. It informs about what comes into contact with the skin and helps distinguish a harmless contact from a threatening one.

In the field, this bottom row can be spotted through details that are often put down to character. The child who refuses certain textures, who stiffens when jostled in line, or conversely the one who constantly seeks to spin, jump, bump into things. In adults, it is the person who tolerates tight clothing or labels poorly, whose portrait you will find in the article on tactile hypersensitivity in adults. The body receives its information askew, too strongly or too weakly, or it fails to get used to it.

A well-functioning nervous system ends up habituating, that is, ignoring a repeated, harmless stimulus: the noise of the radiator, the touch of the sock, the grain of the jersey. When this habituation does not happen, every stimulation keeps its original volume, and the person spends the day managing signals that others no longer even notice. As long as this bottom row demands attention, energy goes into managing the body, and less is left for the board or for the coach's instruction. The link with athletic performance is developed in our episode on sensory integration and performance.

Level 3: sensorimotor development, when the body becomes a map

At the third level, sensory information is transformed into motor know-how. The pyramid places six skills there.

The body schema is the map the brain builds of the body: where the limbs are, what size they are, how they move relative to one another. Reflex maturity refers to the infant's archaic reflexes, those automatic responses, like the Moro reflex, which must fade over the first years to make room for voluntary movement. The idea that some persist and leave a trace in adults is defended by several practitioners and remains debated; we detail it in the article on archaic reflexes in adults. Filtering of sensory information refers to the ability to relegate to the background what does not matter, the noise from the hallway or the label on the T-shirt, to keep attention on what does.

Postural security describes the body's confidence in its relationship with gravity, and Ayres had described its opposite in 1979 under the name gravitational insecurity. A child with postural security accepts having their feet off the ground, climbing, leaning out into the void to grab an object. One who lacks it experiences every imbalance as an alarm and clings to the ground. Awareness of both sides of the body, also called bilateral integration, lets the two halves work together and then specialize, and cross the midline without hesitation. The article on the asymmetrical tonic neck reflex shows what happens when this crossing jams.

The sixth box, motor planning, speaks to a coach right away. It is about conceiving, organizing and launching a movement you have never done before, what the technical vocabulary calls, in the broad sense, praxis. The child who reproduces a movement after ten demonstrations but stumbles as soon as a detail changes often shows you that box. So does the athlete, when he masters an exercise in the gym and gets lost as soon as the instruction is modified.

This level is largely built on the floor, during the first years, through crawling, pushing, rolling over and falling. That is why the floor movements of primary motor skills keep their value well beyond childhood.

Level 4: perceptual-motor development, the eye, the hand and space

At the fourth level, the organized body meets the world, and the pyramid arranges six skills there, all of which serve to act accurately in space.

Eye-hand coordination lets the hand go where the eye has looked, to catch a ball or trace a letter. Oculomotor control refers to the precision of eye movements: fixating, following a target, jumping from one point to another, converging on a nearby object. The article on vision and ocular convergence details this last point, and the one on vision and balance shows how much gaze contributes to stability. Postural adjustment corresponds to the automatic corrections that keep the body stable while it acts, a notion clearly distinguished from balance in the article on postural control.

The top row is more surprising when you come from sport. It brings together language and auditory skills, attentional functions and visuospatial perception, the kind that lets you locate objects relative to each other and tell a b from a d. Their place at this level makes sense: these skills require a body able to hold its posture and stabilize its gaze. In our view, this is the most underestimated line of the diagram. Reread this sentence while gently turning your head from right to left: if the words stay sharp, it is your vestibular system stabilizing your gaze. Without it, every line would take effort, and it becomes easier to understand why visual attention sits above the vestibular system.

In the athlete, this level carries the reading of the game. The goalkeeper tracks the ball while moving, the tennis player adjusts his footing to a spinning trajectory, the basketball player sees the pass without turning his head. All these perceptual-motor skills rest on a sensorimotor level that has to hold below, especially when fatigue sets in.

Level 5: cognition and intellect, the level everyone evaluates

At the top, three boxes: activities of daily living, behavior and, right at the top, academic learning. It is the level everyone evaluates, because it is the only one you can see: the report card and the notebook, but also the ability to dress alone or to behave in a group.

We judge at the top, and most often we act at the top. The child writes poorly, we give them handwriting lines. They cannot sit still, we reword the instruction. The pyramid asks a different question: what, lower down, makes this level so costly for them? Sometimes nothing, and work at the top is enough. Other times, a box on the second or third level pulls everything down, and you can repeat the instruction for months without changing anything.

The athlete has his own top: the tactical decision, the game plan applied, the technical instruction finally integrated. When an athlete "does not understand" a clear instruction, the temptation is to repeat it louder or break it into pieces. The pyramid invites you to first check what is carrying it. It joins here the distinction between training and learning: a repeated instruction can improve the day's session without the movement being truly learned.

Not to be confused with Dale's pyramid and its percentages

The other pyramid, the one with percentages, takes up a good share of search results and of artificial intelligence assistants' answers. The following table lets you tell them apart.

The cone of experience published by Edgar Dale in 1946 in Audio-Visual Methods in Teaching contained no percentages. The figures were grafted on later, and the NTL, which circulates them, has never been able to produce the original study. Kåre Letrud published a rebuttal in 2012. A year later, Ken Masters reviewed 43 medical education publications: the sources cited for these percentages proved misleading or circular, and he recommended no longer referring to them.

If these figures appear in a training course, you now have what you need to put them back in their place. And if someone talks to you about the pyramid of learning while mentioning the vestibular system and body schema, they are indeed talking about the one by Taylor and Trott.

What the pyramid proves, and what it does not prove

The pyramid describes a widely shared developmental logic: the body's senses organize early, voluntary movement is built on them, and academic skills mobilize everything beneath them. This logic fits what we know about child development.

No one, however, has tested it as a strict hierarchy. No study shows that level 2 would need to be validated before touching level 3. Motor development researchers even describe a process more tangled than a staircase: in their dynamic systems approach (1994), Esther Thelen and Linda Smith see skills emerge together and influence each other in both directions. A child also learns to hold themselves better by learning to catch.

The evidence on approaches that start from the base is nuanced, too. Ayres sensory integration has gained in solidity: the systematic review by Sarah Schoen and her colleagues (2019) concludes that, in autistic children aged 4 to 12, it meets the criteria of an evidence-based practice, relying on two randomized controlled trials; Bradley S. Stevenson contested this reading the same year. In children with coordination difficulties, the meta-analysis by Bouwien Smits-Engelsman and her colleagues (2013) is more clear-cut. Directly training the task produces a much stronger effect there than working only on the functions presumed to lie beneath.

The pyramid therefore helps you spot the level that is slipping. The order of the work is then decided in the field, in light of the retests.

The Pyramid of Learning in the field, from child to athlete

To use it without being an occupational therapist or a special education teacher, read it from top to bottom, then work in both directions.

The reading starts from what you observe at the top. The athlete does not integrate a positioning instruction, falls apart as soon as the game speeds up, loses his technique at the end of the session while his physical qualities still hold. You then go down a level to see what carries this movement. You check whether his gaze stays stable when he moves, whether his postural adjustment keeps up when the surface changes, whether his body map is as precise on the left as on the right. Each answer guides what you do next, and none replaces a health professional's assessment.

This grid is a LabO RNP field reading, built from the pyramid; it does not have the value of a validated assessment tool.

This is the logic we teach in Neuro-Postural Reprogramming: read where the system slips before loading the top, then check through a test, a stimulation and a retest that you touched the right level.

The work itself goes both ways. The real task stays at the heart of the session, as the meta-analysis cited above suggests, and you add in a targeted way what consolidates the fragile level. A player whose gaze slips while running will work on gaze stability, then immediately put it back to the test in a game situation. A child whose motor planning jams will do courses that change a little on each pass rather than repeating the same figure, in the spirit of the constraints-based approach.

When a level seems to be giving way in a child, to the point of weighing on their schooling or daily life, the assessment goes back to health professionals: the occupational therapist, the psychomotor therapist, the physician following the child. The movement professional observes and refers, then works on movement; putting a label on it falls outside their role.

What the pyramid will never tell you

It will not tell you why a top-level athlete can have a fragile sensory row and still perform. Talent and years of repetition mask a lot. Our field hypothesis: the fragile base is then paid for elsewhere, in slower technical progression or faster fatigue as soon as the task gets complicated. The pyramid helps you formulate the hypothesis; it is the retest that will tell you whether it holds.

This hypothesis can, moreover, be put to the test. In an athlete whose technique degrades mostly when the gaze has to follow a moving target, a few weeks of targeted work on gaze stability should first improve a visual tracking test, then the quality of the movement measured in the same situation. If the test improves and the movement does not budge, the fragile level lay elsewhere.

What you see at the top tells you where to look. It is often lower down that you will find something to work on.

👉 I want to understand why, not just what.

The complete file: the Pyramid of Learning, level by level

Each level of the pyramid and each question it raises now has its own article. On the levels side, you will find the pyramid's sensory systems, sensorimotor development and perceptual-motor development, with a separate article on the reflex maturity box.

On uses and debates, read the Pyramid of Learning in sport, the match between starting from the base or from the task, the guide to observing at which level it jams, the role of posture as a load-bearing level and the neuromechanics behind the diagram. And if someone brings up the retention percentages again, the story of Dale's pyramid gives you what you need to put them back in their place.

Frequently asked questions about the Pyramid of Learning

Who created the Pyramid of Learning?

The pyramid was designed in 1991 by Kathleen Taylor, an occupational therapist, and Maryann Trott, a special education teacher, based on A. Jean Ayres's sensory integration theory. Mary Sue Williams and Sherry Shellenberger then popularized it in their guide How Does Your Engine Run? (1996), hence the name under which it is known in France.

How many levels does the Pyramid of Learning have?

Five: the central nervous system, the sensory systems, sensorimotor development, perceptual-motor development and, at the top, cognition and intellect. Above this base, twenty-two skills are spread across four levels: seven sensory systems, six sensorimotor skills, six perceptual-motor skills and three at the top.

What is the difference with Dale's pyramid?

The pyramid attributed to Edgar Dale claims to quantify retention according to teaching method, with percentages that have never been demonstrated. The Taylor and Trott pyramid describes the sensory and motor foundations on which learning rests. The two models have similar names and nothing else in common.

Is the Pyramid of Learning scientifically validated?

Its general logic is consistent with what we know about development, but the strict order between levels has not been demonstrated. Real development is more intertwined, and in children with coordination difficulties, working directly on the task gives better results than working only on the foundations.

Can you skip a level of the pyramid?

A child or an athlete can develop an upper level while a box below remains fragile, often by compensating. In the athlete, we hypothesize that this cost shows up later, for example as a technical ceiling. Hence the value of reading the lower levels when the top stagnates.

Does the pyramid also apply to adults and athletes?

It was designed for children. Its use in adults and athletes is a transposition, not validated as such, which keeps its value as a reading grid: when a technical movement or a decision degrades, it invites you to check what carries it, starting with gaze and posture, before repeating the instruction.

How do you spell Shellenberger?

The author's name is spelled Sherry Shellenberger, without a "c." You often read "Williams and Schellenberger," "Shellenberg" or "Schellenberg" in French-language documents: it is the same pyramid.

Who should you refer to when a level seems fragile in a child?

To the physician following the child, an occupational therapist or a psychomotor therapist: they are the ones who carry out the assessment. LabO RNP is neither medical nor paramedical, and is added as a complement to a care pathway, never in its place.

Sources

Taylor K., Trott M. (1991). Pyramid of Learning, diagram reproduced in Williams M.S., Shellenberger S. (1996). How Does Your Engine Run? A Leader's Guide to the Alert Program for Self-Regulation. Albuquerque: TherapyWorks.

Ayres A.J. (1972). Sensory Integration and Learning Disorders. Los Angeles: Western Psychological Services.

Ayres A.J. (1979). Sensory Integration and the Child. Los Angeles: Western Psychological Services.

Dale E. (1946). Audio-Visual Methods in Teaching. New York: Dryden Press.

Thelen E., Smith L.B. (1994). A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Schoen S.A. et al. (2019). A systematic review of Ayres Sensory Integration intervention for children with autism. Autism Research, 12(1), 6-19.

Stevenson B.S. (2019). Response to "Application of the Council for Exceptional Children's Standards for Evidence-Based Practices in Special Education" by Schoen et al. Autism Research, 12(8), 1152-1153.

Smits-Engelsman B.C.M. et al. (2013). Efficacy of interventions to improve motor performance in children with developmental coordination disorder: a combined systematic review and meta-analysis. Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology, 55(3), 229-237.

Letrud K. (2012). A rebuttal of NTL Institute's learning pyramid. Education, 133(1), 117-124.

Masters K. (2013). Edgar Dale's Pyramid of Learning in medical education: a literature review. Medical Teacher, 35(11), e1584-e1593.

By the LabO RNP team