This research investigated the impact of using manipulatives on 56 Grade 5 students’ (27 male, 29 female; age 10-11 years) mathematics achievement. A quasi experimental, action research design was utilized in which the experimental group was taught selected topics from the Number strand using manipulatives during a 3-week intervention, while the control group’s instruction did not include the use of manipulatives. Data were collected using a pre- and post-test and analysed using descriptive statistics and a Mann-Whitney U test.

Formal vocational education has been available in Jamaica for more than a century. When the island became a crown colony in 1866, technical/vocational education was given a great boost, although it was not until 1896 when Kingston Technical School was established that commercial subjects were introduced. Industrial Training Centres (ITC) such as Carron Hall(1924), Knockalva, Holmwood, and Dinthill (1930s) were established to provide manual training.

Schools cannot improve without people working together... None of us no matter what our position, has the answer to the complex problems we face. The more people work together the more we have the possibility of better understanding those complex problems and acting on them in an atmosphere of trust and mutual respect. (Liebermann 1986,6) 

Examining the experiences of a sample of Jamaican teachers during that critical first year after professional training, the paper looks closely at their accounts of their classroom management style, and how they balance their own personal beliefs as well as what they learned in college with the reality of the learning environment. Interviews yielded data which suggest that those teachers with classroom experience prior to entering college were more comfortable with a democratic management style than those without this exposure.

Democratization is quickly becoming accepted as the process by which a country's education system can achieve its goals of promoting modernization and facilitating a desirable quality of life for all its citizens. In this paper, democratization is viewed as a process which can empower the education system to deliver as far as is possible the education that is required to allow all its people to cope with the global environment of which Trinidad and Tobago is a part. 

Many factors determine access to and the quality of education that a country provides for its citizenry. A major constraint is the high per capita cost of education and the capacity of the state to meet that cost. These issues are focused on from two complementary perspectives. The first part of the paper takes a historical perspective. The democratization of education in the English-speaking Caribbean territories at critical points in their history is traced, including the interplay between economic factors and educational provision.

These are challenging times for education not only from the social or economic perspective but also because we can no longer dismiss science fiction, techniques other than teachers present face-to-face systems that induce learning. Various technologies now attack some of the foundations on which our pedagogy is based. 

The study sought to find out the nature of students' perceptions of the democratization of five aspects of their science lessons and to establish if there were significant gender differences in their perceptions. Data were collected from 250 science students in grades 10 (N=126) and 11 (N=124), comprising 138 boys and 112 girls who volunteered from six traditional high schools in rural and urban areas of Jamaica.

 
The features of small states in the English-speaking Caribbean are examined to assess the relevance of the school curriculum to conditions in the region. The conclusion is that the curriculum could be considerably more responsive to features of Caribbean states, which include both assets and liabilities. A systems model for curriculum engineering as the instrument for effecting the needed curriculum reform is proposed. The strategy aims at producing the reservoir of human resources needed to exploit both the assets and liabilities in order to achieve sustainable development. 

Issues of equity and democracy, which have dominated the education ferment of the 1990s in the Caribbean, are examined in Vol. 18 of the Caribbean Journal of Education. No. 1 focused on issues of conceptualization; No. 2 now turns the spotlight on issues of practice. The papers were selected from among those presented at the Faculty (now School] of Education's third biennial conference, which examined some key issues as well as strategies proposed for democratizing education in the Caribbean. The papers have been revised and reviewed for publication in the journal.