Arab Educational Information Network

This research aimed to use the descriptive analysis method to analyze the chemical representations included in all four high school chemistry textbooks in Saudi Arabia. The data that was required for the research was collected using Gkitzia et al.’s (2011) instrument, which consisted of the following criteria: the type of representation, interpretation of surface features, relatedness to the text, existence and properties of a caption, and the degree of correlation between representations comprising multiple ones. The results of the research indicated that most representations in high school chemistry textbooks were macroscopic representations, reaching 45.9%, and the textbooks used a few multiple and mixed representations. Most of the interpretations of the surface features of representations, i.e., 81.6% of them, were explicit representations. It was found that most of the chemical representations, i.e., 82.6%, were completely related and linked to the text. Besides, the results of the research indicated that more than half of the chemical representations included captions and that the majority, i.e., 73.6%, of the representations that comprised multiple representations were adequately linked. In light of these findings, the research resulted in several recommendations, one of which was that the authors of high school chemistry textbooks in Saudi Arabia should include multiple category and mixed categories representations. High accuracy will be required in the process of properly combining these components in one representation. (Published abstract)