Experience, Represent, Apply (ERA) heuristic - STEM Education Research Centre (SERC)

Fig. 1 Experience, Represent, Apply (ERA) heuristic

© Copyright SPLAT-Maths. Reproduced under exclusive licence to SERC.

Experience, Represent, Apply (ERA)

Centenary Professor Tom Lowrie has developed an Experience, Represent, Apply (ERA) heuristic for use in educational contexts.

This ERA heuristic has now been embedded into the Early Learning STEM Australia (ELSA) program to support rich, connected experiences while engaging with digital technology. All on-app experiences are scaffolded in ways that encourage children to represent their ideas in different ways. This is vastly different to ‘gaming’ or ‘training’ environments that are decontextualised and promote rote learning.

The use of ERA in ELSA

Active engagement with the ELSA apps is restricted to the Represent component of the learning design. The Experience activities are intended to scaffold student understanding, as well as encourage play-based curiosity to use the apps. The Apply component relates to activities the children participate in after they played the app (Lowrie et al., 2018).

The ERA model is supported by more than 100 custom-designed activities – delivered via the Educator app – for children to experience, and to apply the concepts represented on the apps. These activities have been used in over 110 pilot preschool services, by approximately 400 educators and 4200 children.

Importantly, educators were instrumental in helping the ELSA team to develop these activities.

ERA example in ELSA

First, educators introduce opportunities for children to Experience an idea in their preschool. Next, children use the ELSA apps to Represent the idea in a digital format. Then, educators present opportunities for children to Apply the idea to their own environment.

Educators taking part in ELSA receive training in how to use the ERA model to embed digital technology into preschool programs. The following is an example of the ERA model in App 1: Patterns and Relationships.

Step 1: Experience

Educators start with experiences in the real world that introduce children to the ideas of sorting, ordering, and patterns.

Tidying up is a great way for children to play with different ways of sorting – by colour, size, or another attribute. Many picture books use patterns to repeat text or explore the order of events.

Experiences like these help children understand what they already know, and also develop the appropriate language to communicate their knowledge. It also helps the educator find out where children are at in their learning.

Step 2: Represent

In the Patterns and Relationships app, children can engage with Lunch Boxes, an activity that explores sorting in a digital environment. Children sort food into lunch boxes on whatever attribute they choose, then use the device’s microphone to describe how they sorted.

The Photo Story activity is about ordering. Children put photos into the order they occurred, and can make their own stories using the camera on the device. Using the microphone and camera capabilities in the device helps embed technology into the preschool, while connecting digital and physical environments to assist with transferring learning.

Step 3: Apply

After engaging with the app, children can apply what they learned using different materials and in different situations.

Educators and children can create a sorting station with materials that suit complex sorting. For example, a two-way sort that sorts by two attributes.

Educators can support children to paint or draw frames to tell a story that is meaningful to them. Apply activities can then lead into experiences, leading to a continual cycle of learning.

This is a novel approach to embedding digital technology within preschool programs. Survey responses from pilot educators show they are using the ERA model, and creating their own off-app activities.

ERA’s pedagogical inclusiveness

From a pedagogical perspective, ELSA’s foundation of inclusiveness was built on spatial thinking and the ERA model.

Both were critical in providing accessible entry points for all children, regardless of gender, cultural heritage, socio-economic status or disabilities.

By using UC’s ERA model for the ELSA Pilot, all children’s experiences can be scaffolded, irrespective of their previous levels of understanding.

Essentially, the ERA model levelled the playing field, ensuring that all children were included and could participate in ELSA.

A shining example of how the ERA model helped achieve ELSA’s philosophy of STEM for all, are the Experience and Apply activities that Dr Robyn Jorgensen developed with remote Indigenous Australian communities.

Working with educators and community elders, Dr Jorgensen situated learning to promote cultural affordances.

One such activity involved community elders teaching traditional dance to children (an experience or apply activity) which linked to ELSA’s ‘Let’s dance’ activity on App 1: Patterns and Relationships.

ERA and STEM Practices

The ERA heuristic is the primary mechanism used in workshops to assist in the embedding of STEM Practices in the preschools. The ERA model was developed to assist educators to focus on engaging students in the use of STEM Practices through the enactment of practices they can perceive to be authentic (Lowrie et al., 2018).