The difficulties encountered by students in learning chemistry range from human factors to the intrinsic nature of chemistry. To enhance students’ understanding of chemistry, there is a wide consensus within the community of chemistry educators on the importance of and need to integrate different levels of representations in chemistry teaching and learning resources. As learning resources, textbooks are ubiquitous and usually readily available to both students and teachers. Therefore, this study investigated how chemical phenomena are represented or depicted in secondary school chemistry textbooks. We adopted a rubric developed by Gkitziaet al.(Gkitzia V., Salta K. and Tzougraki C., (2011), Development and application of suitable criteria for the evaluation of chemical representations in school textbooks,Chem. Educ. Res. Pract.,12, 5–14) to analyze the textbooks for types of representations; relatedness of chemical representations to text; and the appropriateness of captions. The results indicated the dominance of symbolic representations, followed by sub-microscopic, then hybrid and multiple representations. In all three textbooks, there was no evidence of mixed representation. While many of the chemical representations were completely related to the texts, some were unlinked. The germaneness of suitable captions in textbooks is in the explicit, brief and concise explanation that captions give to an entire representation. While our results indicated that more than half of the representations had suitable captions, there was evidence of representations that were problematic and had no captions. The implication of these results for students’ cognitive load, and the need for textbook-users to explore alternative resources that depict phenomena in 2D or 3D representations are discussed.

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Learners play very significant roles in the teaching–learning process. Irrespective of how teachers teach, learners often have their own ways of learning. Three hundred senior secondary school II students selected from 10 senior secondary schools in Ilorin, Nigeria participated in the study. Simple random sampling technique was used to select 30 students from each of the 10 purposively sampled senior secondary schools. Data were collected using three instruments, namely, Chemistry Self-Efficacy Questionnaire, Chemistry Metacognition Questionnaire and Chemistry Achievement Test with reliability indices of 0.83, 0.73 and 0.86, respectively. Answers were provided to four research questions each of which has a corresponding hypothesis. The hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance using Pearson Product Moment Correlation, regression and analysis of variance. Findings from the study indicates significant positive relationship among senior secondary school students’ Chemistry self-efficacy, metacognition and their achievement in Chemistry F(2, 297) = 332.482, p < 0.05. Keywords: Academic achievement, metacognition, self-efficacy, senior secondary schools.