At the Fourth International Congress on Mathematical Education (ICME IV) held at Berkeley in August 1980, Prof. Ubiratan D'Ambrosio proposed to Caribbean participants that there should be a conference sponsored by the Inter-American Committee on Mathematical Education (IACME) on mathematics education in the English-speaking Caribbean. This suggestion was accepted and it was also agreed that Dr. Fred Lemmer, a board member of IACME and a staff member of the University of Suriname, would try to organise such a conference to be held in his country.

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.

The aim of this study is to examine the psychological and environmental vari­ables which are related to the mathematics achievement of third-year students in Jamaican post-primary schools. A correlational study of the inter-relations of thirteen independent variables with the criterion, mathematics achievement, was factor-analysed to produce four factors which account for most of the variation in mathematical performance.

In 1967 the Jamaican Ministry of Education, through its Curriculum Committee, introduced a "modern" mathematics programme in the then recently established Junior Secondary schools. The Grade Nine Achievement Test (GNAT) in Mathematics is one of the tests used by the Ministry of Education to select students from the grade nine population in Junior Secondary and All Age schools for second cycle secondary education in High schools and Technical schools. Since 1970 this test has reflected the change in content of the Junior Secondary mathematics syllabus.