A university training programme was developed as part of a project to improve the standard of primary level numeracy in Trinidad and Tobago. Fifty-eight primary level teachers completed training to conduct workshops and provide field supervision in developmental and remedial mathematics. The programme of work, including activities and assessment techniques, is presented. The evaluation of both the university programme and the workshop training provides a background for reviewing the project's current status.

Reading comprehension, that is, functional literacy, was tested among a sample of 3,269 grade 6 students in Jamaican primary and all-age schools. The percentages of functional literacy varied greatly, as did the statistically significant differences in mean scores across school types, geographical locations, and sexes. In addition, performance in paragraph comprehension was more adversely affected by the levels of thinking the questions required than by the difficulty level of the paragraphs. The findings carry important implications for reading instruction.

Throughout the history of Caribbean education there has been a struggle to initiate and maintain science in the school curriculum. At first, science education was conceived as strictly utilitarian, necessary for producing people in the trades. That same stance however made it more difficult for science education to gain its rightful place in the training of the young. Some change has occurred in the past 20 years or so, but to many science educators these have done very little to enhance science in the curriculum.

This assessment of primary education in the Caribbean at the end of the 1980s considers how many, and which, children actually receive this type of education, the kind and quality of the education provided and received, and its cost. Further, the effectiveness of the educational provision is measured, and the constraints and challenges ahead are described.

I accept with pleasure and some amount of humility the invitation to write a short introduction to the special issue of the Caribbean Journal of Education devoted to primary education in honour of the Reginald N. Murray’s contribution to that sector of schooling. I worked with him for more than two decades in administration, and then in academics at the university of the West Indies, Mona, and the Caribbean Education Council, and generally in the wider world of education.

Caribbean Journal of Education (CJE) first appeared in 1974, 26 years after the establishment of The University College of the West Indies (UCWJ) in 1948. The University became The University of the West Indies (UWJ) in 1962; and CJE has emerged as the official journal for educational research in the Caribbean. This account of the journal serves to place it in the context of the evolution of the University's Departments of Education over the years. The index which follows this brief history is the main purpose of the undertaking. It covers the period 1983-1999.

The current wave of educational reform in Trinidad and Tobago follows the pattern in the West, at least in its rhetoric. Excellence, total quality management, quality assurance, school improvement, are buzz phrases associated with the larger concept of national unity and total quality nation. This paper argues that achieving the educational utopias and panaceas implied by these value laden terms demands a real­istic appraisal of the education system, and more specifically teacher education. The Education Policy Paper: 1993-2003 (Ministry of Education 1993), is used as the source document.

Usually in discussions about schooling, the predominant concern is with academic achievement, while the effect of the invisible or hidden curriculum is often overlooked Current societal trends across the Caribbean suggest that these societies are undergoing transformations with respect to social norms and value systems. The changes that are in evidence are not all positive or desirable. Consequently we are forced to focus on the schooling process and its potentially elusive, ultimate effects.

There is the perception among members of the teaching fraternity that the inservice Diploma in Education (DipEd) Programme offered at The University of the West Indies (UWJ), St. Augustine Campus, has little impact on the classroom practices of the graduates. This perception is significant since an important goal of any teacher education programme is to empower teachers to change their behaviours. Meaningful change involves alteration of beliefs, that is, the pedagogical assumptions and theories underpinning the change. The inservice programme at St.

This paper argues that language and education are so intricately intertwined that the failure to give adequate recognition to the role of language in promoting effective education systems has worked to the detriment of institutionalized education. It suggests that a revised vision would require that conscious attention be paid to matters of a linguistic nature. These are encapsulated in a discipline called educational linguistics, which explores the many complex links between language and education. The need is particularly acute in the "Anglophone" Caribbean.