This special section focuses on the evaluation of national curriculum strategies which was commissioned by the Ministry of Education, Jamaica through The UWI Consulting Inc. (see Jennings-Craig et al., 2012). The focal points for the evaluation were Numeracy, Literacy/Language Arts and Spanish in primary schools, and English Language, Mathematics and Modern Languages (Spanish and French) in secondary schools.

This paper discusses the evaluation of the teaching and learning and Spanish in non-traditional and traditional secondary schools across Jamaica, and focusses on determining the contexts, inputs, processes and product of the implementation of the Spanish curriculum in select secondary schools. The research utilised a mixed-method approach, and employed questionnaires, interviews and classroom observations.

Government policy and curriculum–based programmes usually tend to be challenging to implement and sustain on a large scale. This paper examines the implementation and evaluation of the National Curriculum Strategies for Modern Languages–Spanish at the primary level in Jamaica. This project was undertaken from January–April 2012. For this project, surveys and interviews were used to collect data from 98 students and 6 teachers in primary schools across the island.