Education has always been vulnerable to psychometric incursions and influence, although less so now than before. Lacking a distinctive and self-confident view about the purpose of testing in schools and about what kinds of tests were suitable and unsuitable, it has, rather like a client state, looked on helplessly as psychometric doctrines and practices have been installed and put to work.

The job of administering schools has become increasingly complex because of the many societal changes occasioning new demands on the school. Principals are held accountable for administration of their schools, and their effectiveness depends largely on their ability to respond appropriately to the many changing internal and external demands, and to maintain the stability and cohesiveness necessary to the achievement of established goals.

The ethnolinguistic claim that residents of communities of dialectical diversity who interact with a wide cross-section of speakers need competencies, active and passive, in various dialects, and sensitivity to sociolinguistic norms and their role in acerbating and ameliorating social conflicts has pragmatic currency, particularly in regard to the pedagogical decisions of educators. A refined awareness of the language and culture of the student's community can function to yield rational educational models and intervention strategies.

This study proposes a schema for categorising reading interests based on an identification of basic interest and dominant interest(s) among interest elements in reading materials. A methodology which involved making forced choices within thirteen groups of three passages, each with a unique combina-tion of interest elements, was used to ascertain the reading interests of 438 fourth and 412 first grade children in fourteen primary schools in Jamaica. Grade and environmental differences in reading interests were determined by the use of a 2x3 chi-square test.

This study investigated the effect of science experiences on the fifth-grade Trinidadian child's concept of Piagetian physical causality. The sample comprised 835 children from 37 schools. The tests used were the Concept Assessment Kit—Conservation Forms A & B, the Metropolitan Achievement Test, Form C, and two clinical interviews which assessed the child's concepts of living and floating. The experimental group scored significantly higher than the control group.

Current practice in the teaching of reading and the diagnosis of reading difficulties in the Eastern Caribbean tends to focus on the content and methodology of reading. That is, our focus tends to be on better materials, more appropriately sequenced instructional programmes (with content usually taken as given), or on improved teacher methodologies. Quite clearly these are important and relevant variables in the teaching of reading. The problem is that such a conceptual framework ties us to a fixed perspective of reading instruction especially at the beginning reading stage.

Policies with regard to language in education in the Caribbean regionhave historically been formulated on the basis of considerations not necessarily related to the linguistic realities of the speech communities of the region. In the last two decades however political change and increased linguistic information have allowed adjustments to be made so that curricula might try to reflect to some extent goals that will satisfy the needs of the populations for which they were designed.

This paper describes, in some detail, stages in the development of a Science Attitude Scale for Jamaican 10th-grade students. The statistical techniques employed with the original item pool (and which resulted in a 36-item scale being proposed as a suitable instrument for the purpose intended) are discussed. Reliability and preliminary validation exercises are also reported, and proposals for further refinement of the new scale are outlined.

Perhaps the simplest way of stating the question is in terms of the relationship between language and thought or between language and knowledge or between language structure and the structure of the perceptual world; and I wish here to make a confession about why this subject interests me in relation to Caribbean speech behaviour.

This paper presents a descriptive case study of students’ proficiency in argumentative writing prior to receiving instruction. Data were collected from students at two purposefully sampled traditional denominational schools, a boys’ secondary and a girls’ secondary school in Trinidad and Tobago. Teachers asked students to write an argumentative essay on a topic that they felt was within students’ prior knowledge. However, analysis of those essays revealed that most students needed “intensive support”; only 5.7% of writers needed “some support”.