Curriculum reform has been the major means for effecting educational change in developing countries. Much effort was made in the 1960s and 1970s to change the content of the curriculum in order to make it more relevant to individual and national needs, as many countries, especially, those newly independent tried to achieve development through education (Simmons, 1983). Many developing countries have expanded access to education by building more schools, and educating more teachers.

This is the first issue of the first volume of the Journal of Education and Development in the Caribbean.

Earlier learning renders later performance more efficient through specific transfer and non-specific transfer. 'Specific transfer' is the application of certain skills and knowledge learnt to specific tasks; for example, in mathematics, a child who is taught to add two one-digit numbers should be able to compute problems involving the addition of two one digit numbers.

Jerome Bruner (1960) writing about structure in The Process of Education states:
Grasping the structure of a subject is understanding it in a way that permits other things to be related to it meaningfully. To learn structure is to learn how things are related.

Children grow up hearing the language of fractions used all around them. For example, a slice of bread, a half of a cake, a quarter to seven. Thus, when children enter school, they have been using the language and ideas of fractions for some time. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that a pupil who reaches Class 5 (11 to 12 age range) should, with or without instructions, perform better in fractions than a pupil in either Class 4 (10 to 11 age range) or Class 3 (9 to 10 age range).

The broad purpose of the Project RLA/142 which is now in mid-run is to expand and assist in improving the existing facilities for teacher education and curriculum development, with respect to pupils at the 10-15 year age level, within fifteen countries of the Commonwealth Caribbean.

Findings about the nature of adult motivation and the rapid expansion of knowledge about mathematics and its pedagogy, suggested that teacher training in mathematics should be planned and executed under two major guidelines. Further, a school mathematics programme should be concerned, in the first place, with children learning mathematics usefully and meaningfully. A second concern, which derived its importance mainly from the first, should be the preparation of teachers to teach mathematics so that the pupils could learn it in a 'non-arbitrary substantive fashion.