There has been growing interest, over the past twenty years or so, in the importance of creative production as an aspect of human intellect and personality. Results of numerous investigations in this field have provided some thought-provoking information on the relationship between creativity and educational concerns such as curriculum structure, contextual/situational factors of the school, and academic orientation and sex differences among students, although, in respect of the latter aspect, there tends to be conflicting opinions.

This paper describes, in some detail, stages in the development of a Science Attitude Scale for Jamaican 10th-grade students. The statistical techniques employed with the original item pool (and which resulted in a 36-item scale being proposed as a suitable instrument for the purpose intended) are discussed. Reliability and preliminary validation exercises are also reported, and proposals for further refinement of the new scale are outlined.

Prediction-type research deals, in a general sense, with the functional relations between a criterion of success and events occurring before. One chooses a number of tests or measures for tryout, and then determines their predictive effectiveness in respect of the designated criterion. In this investigation, the main focus is to enquire into the extent to which measures of a student's ability, coupled with other related inputs (the "events occurring before") predict success or failure in an academic course of study.

Several papers have examined educational research in the Caribbean from different perspectives, but all acknowledge the seminal role played by the University of the West Indies Faculty of Education. Miller (1984:8-9), for example, has pointed out that even in its formative years, the Faculty set about establishing a centre for the study of education, whose function was to be: