Until recently the West Indian islands have been utilizing curricula developed in other countries. In the late sixties a few islands began to develop their own curricula. The pressure of demand from the new secondary schools for the immediate provision of material led to the rapid and efficient production of detailed curriculum guides but often precluded any fundamental study of the way children in the schools actually think.

This study addresses the issue of equality of opportunity in Trinidad and Tobago. It examines (1) the social-class background of students attending two types of secondary schools and (2) differences between the two types of secondary school regarding students' self-concepts, attitude toward technical and academic forms of education and educational and occupational expectations.

After Trinidad and Tobago gained independence in 1962, noticeable changes began to take place in the Education System. An important aim of these changes was to increase educational opportunities by providing greater access to secondary education. A conscious effort was set in train, therefore, to expand and transform the education system. Changes in the system which began after the attainment of statehood greatly accelerated in the seventies thanks to considerably increased revenues from the oil windfall.

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.

A total of 101 Barbadian adolescents were rated by teachers on the Revised Behaviour Problem Checklist; 84 were also rated by parents. Students attending one of the prestigious secondary schools were rated as having fewer problems than peers at other types of schools. There were few significant sex differences. Father presence appeared to have no systematic influence on boys' behaviour; father-absent girls received higher scores than father-present girls from parents, but significantly lower scores from teachers.

The British Caribbean before emancipation has been described as "a barbarian community”. 1 Except perhaps for Barbados which had a relatively large and stable white population, the plantocracy in the various islands had made no serious attempt to establish permanent institutions of any kind in the West Indies and there was no systematic provision for education with four main social groups being identifiable - at the top, the whites made up of attorneys, planters, professionals, men of business who concentrated most of the political and all of the economic power in their own hands.

Field experiences have long been accepted as an important and necessary part of teacher education. Their persistence and acceptance stem in part from an implicit trust in the value of practical experiences. Indeed, the need for field experiences appears self-evident to manya sine qua non for certification. The term 'field experiences' refers to all activities engaged in in schools and classrooms. They allow the student teacher to gain first hand knowledge of children, classrooms, teachers and teaching.

In this paper, 360 mental maps drawn by 120 Jamaican students are examined with regard to the influence of age and gender on the development of skills of spatial representation The spatial representations produced as mental maps give an indication of spatial conception, although the two are not synonymous. The patterns to emerge from the research were complex, with evidence both for a steady accretion of spatial information and for developmental stages. There were also no simplistic or unidirectional gender effects.

This paper presents and discusses the findings of a quantitative and linguistic analysis of morphological errors in Spanish produced by a sample of 205 grade 8 students and 181 grade 10 students in Jamaican high schools. The main purpose of the study was to ascertain frequency and types of errors as indications respectively of the level and nature of difficulty experienced by learners at these two grade levels.

Four chronologically different groups of students -- two from a private secondary school and two from the University - were administered a spatial analogy test and a coding test. The results point to marked superiority in performance by the younger groups, especially on the spatial analogy test. The relationships between the two tests range from low negative for the youngest group to positively significant for the oldest group.