While educational psychology is normally assumed to contribute scientific, research-based ideas to a better understanding of teaching/learning environments, its concepts can be alternatively considered as products of particular socio-historical contexts whose contemporary application may be neither politically neutral nor pedagogically advantageous. This argument is examined with particular reference to psychology in education policy in Barbados over the past decade, which is expected to transform the society through transforming schools.

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.

Since Jamaica gained its independence, successive governments of the country have implemented various curriculum policy initiatives at both the primary and secondary levels of the education system, aimed at providing increased access and improved quality education for citizens. While many of these initiatives have led to increased access to education in the island, the issue of improved quality education continues to be a challenge.

Divergent discourses in education affecting social investment policies are driven by disparate perceptions of education as value, whether societal, individual, or by restructuring definitions of human capital beyond truncated utility measurements. In that context, powerful policy actors are making decisions based on their class cohort experience of what education should be, resulting in distinguishing evaluative properties that design education policy typologies to fit.