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Four early childhood education teachers, two veteran and two newer teachers, were asked to pilot the use of handheld Personal Data Assistants loaded with Childchart assessment software. The participants were observed in their use of the electronic devices for monitoring student performance and interviewed regarding the use of the devices and their implications for assessment of early childhood learners. Veteran teachers indicated differences in both the use of the software programs and the style in which assessment activities were completed compared to newer teachers. The results indicate the need for professional development of new technologies to focus beyond the utilization of software and hardware and that new technologies implementation may be the catalyst for improvements in assessment strategies. KEYWORDS assessment, electronic assessment, early childhood education, veteran and new practitionersThe use of Personal Data Assistants (PDAs) in formative assessments of early childhood education has been introduced in early childhood settings. These PDAs allow teachers to assess student learning in authentic environments in an ongoing and dynamic manner. Designed to be more flexible and portable, this assessment management system differs from earlier assessment methodologies, where individual students were pulled from classroom settings to perform distant tasks for assessment of skill development (Currie, 2000;Linn & Gronlund, 1995). The purpose of this study was to investigate the perceived differences in assessment strategies employed by veteran and neophyte teachers when using PDAs.

The use of constructivism and its various manifestations in education has been a topic of much interest in recent years. Inquiry into this theoretical framework has resulted in teacher educators' attempts to help their teacher candidates apply constructivist pedagogy in university classrooms, ®eld experiences and student teaching at two US universities. The instructors developed a set of co-requisite, interdisciplinary methods courses entitled the Schoolyard Lab Program. Composed of two three-credit courses (science methods and language arts methods) and a one-credit ®eld experience, the Schoolyard Lab program utilized the Cognitive Process of Instruction (CPOI) as its pedagogical basis. Joan Fulton designed CPOI as a seven-step process that relies on the learner's ability to describe a concept based on its distinguishing attributes, investigate and compare examples of the concept and, ®nally, apply the concept in new and authentic contexts. The Schoolyard Lab Program is the result of a 6 year period of development and has shown signi®cant positive effects of CPOI on the self-ef®cacy beliefs of teacher candidates and in-service teachers who have experienced the program. The two faculty modeled CPOI practices in the university classroom. Teacher candidates were then expected to develop an integrated science and language arts unit plan, applying these same principles in elementary classrooms as they completed ®eld experiences and student teaching. The authors of this article explain the CPOI format, how it conforms to important parts of the teacher education curriculum (such as lesson and unit development) and how this relates to the overall objectives of concept development, subject interrelationships and assessment strategies.Introductioǹ`E