Abstract

Students´ achievements in scientific subjects, such as chemistry, have stringently declined during the past decade. In order to disrupt these declining results in scientific subjects, it´s important to identify factors leading to decreased academic achievements within the scientific subjects. This study aims to investigate the association between students´ achievements in chemistry and self-efficacy beliefs, gender, and locality among Woreillu high school grade 10th students. This study found that students’ level of self-efficacy is medium (57.8) and rural students scored significantly better achievement results than urban students in both sexes. An independent sample t-test analysis showed that there were significant differences in the self-efficacy of chemistry between male and female students. The study found that male students’ self-efficacy and achievement results were higher than those of females were. The Pearson correlation test showed that there was significant relationship between self-efficacy and academic achievement. The study revealed that there were gender difference in self-efficacy and academic performance but there were no locality influences on students’ self-efficacy. These findings are in conformity with the self-efficacy theory, which states that an individual’s attempt tasks, in which he/she believes he/she is good at, are truly very likely to become successful. The implication of the findings from this study can assist the Ministry of Education Ethiopia, schools, and teachers, especially science education teachers, in developing strategies to enhance student science self-efficacy and thus, increase students’ participation in Science/chemistry streams.