Two Grade 10 classes in an urban Jamaican high school were taught over a period of one academic year in two problem-solving styles: an Explicit Style derived from Charles, and an Implicit Style derived from Isaacs. At the end of the academic year there was no significant difference in their performance on a problem-solving test, or on the Reasoning Profile (i.e., the problem-solving profile) of the Caribbean Examinations Council's Basic Proficiency papers.

A total of 101 Barbadian adolescents were rated by teachers on the Revised Behaviour Problem Checklist; 84 were also rated by parents. Students attending one of the prestigious secondary schools were rated as having fewer problems than peers at other types of schools. There were few significant sex differences. Father presence appeared to have no systematic influence on boys' behaviour; father-absent girls received higher scores than father-present girls from parents, but significantly lower scores from teachers.

The British Caribbean before emancipation has been described as "a barbarian community”. 1 Except perhaps for Barbados which had a relatively large and stable white population, the plantocracy in the various islands had made no serious attempt to establish permanent institutions of any kind in the West Indies and there was no systematic provision for education with four main social groups being identifiable - at the top, the whites made up of attorneys, planters, professionals, men of business who concentrated most of the political and all of the economic power in their own hands.

Field experiences have long been accepted as an important and necessary part of teacher education. Their persistence and acceptance stem in part from an implicit trust in the value of practical experiences. Indeed, the need for field experiences appears self-evident to manya sine qua non for certification. The term 'field experiences' refers to all activities engaged in in schools and classrooms. They allow the student teacher to gain first hand knowledge of children, classrooms, teachers and teaching.

In this paper, 360 mental maps drawn by 120 Jamaican students are examined with regard to the influence of age and gender on the development of skills of spatial representation The spatial representations produced as mental maps give an indication of spatial conception, although the two are not synonymous. The patterns to emerge from the research were complex, with evidence both for a steady accretion of spatial information and for developmental stages. There were also no simplistic or unidirectional gender effects.

This paper presents and discusses the findings of a quantitative and linguistic analysis of morphological errors in Spanish produced by a sample of 205 grade 8 students and 181 grade 10 students in Jamaican high schools. The main purpose of the study was to ascertain frequency and types of errors as indications respectively of the level and nature of difficulty experienced by learners at these two grade levels.

Four chronologically different groups of students -- two from a private secondary school and two from the University - were administered a spatial analogy test and a coding test. The results point to marked superiority in performance by the younger groups, especially on the spatial analogy test. The relationships between the two tests range from low negative for the youngest group to positively significant for the oldest group.

Prediction-type research deals, in a general sense, with the functional relations between a criterion of success and events occurring before. One chooses a number of tests or measures for tryout, and then determines their predictive effectiveness in respect of the designated criterion. In this investigation, the main focus is to enquire into the extent to which measures of a student's ability, coupled with other related inputs (the "events occurring before") predict success or failure in an academic course of study.

Research and theory elaborated by Gardner specify the importance of motivation to second/foreign language acquisition and proficiency irrespective of geographical or cultural context, although the precise correlates of motivational intensity tend to vary with the particular cultural setting. Further, motivation appears to be a more significant predictor of second/ foreign language achievement in contexts where the target language is not used by a high percentage of the population.

A method for the analysis of a science curriculum for the levels of cognitive demand that it makes, in Piagetian terms, is described. Examples of the detailed application of this method to the West Indian Science Curriculum are given, and a summary of the demand levels of the whole curriculum presented. A check on the validity of the method of analysis is made both by looking at inter-rater reliability, and also by testing the predictions of success and failure made on the basis of the curriculum analysis combined with pupil assessments.