Page 12 - ALEF EDUCATION PR REPORT JUNE 2025

Press Report

Miqyas Al Dhad Completes Arab World’s Largest Field Survey Ahead of

Launching First Comprehensive Scientific Framework to Assess Arabic

Literacy

Abu Dhabi, June 18, 2025: In a significant milestone towards enhancing Arabic reading
proficiency among native students, Arabic Scale - known as ‘Miqyas Al Dhad’ has successfully
concluded the final phase of its comprehensive field survey. This achievement paves the way
for the official launch of the Arabic reading scale in the third quarter of this year, following an
intensive research effort grounded in advanced scientific methodologies. The field survey was
carried out in collaboration with Ministries of Education and school chains across the Arab

world and involved the active participation of hundreds of educators and language experts.

The field survey encompassed over 110,000 students from 204 schools across 70 rural and
urban areas in nine Arab countries, namely the United Arab Emirates, the Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia, the Arab Republic of Egypt, the Sultanate of Oman, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan,
the Kingdom of Morocco, the State of Libya, the Lebanese Republic, and the Republic of Iraq,

reflecting the initiative’s scope and scale. The field survey was administered digitally using
tablets, desktops, and computer labs. Rigorous proctoring was followed to ensure security of
survey administration.

In developing the field survey items, several reading frameworks and standards were

reviewed and the socio-cognitive framework for reading (Khalifa & Weir, 2009) was utilized.
It should be noted that the sociocognitive framework for reading has been used by reputable
examination boards such as Cambridge. The key components of the sociocognitive framework
for reading comprehension are linguistic knowledge, cognitive processing, background
knowledge, and metacognitive strategies. In building the reading items for the survey, a
rigorous methodology was followed in terms of recruiting, inducting, training, monitoring and
evaluating item writers to ensure the highest standards of item quality.

The Arabic Scale is developed using triangulation scientific research methodology that
integrates both quantitative and qualitative analyses of multiple data sources. In addition to
data gathered from the field survey on students’ reading proficiency, the second data source
involved the creation of a large Arabic corpus featuring over 70 million structures and words,
derived from more than 8,000 carefully curated Arabic texts from various subject areas, fields
and topics reflecting the language’s richness, culture, heritage and diversity.

The third data source was via conducting a pairwise comparative study with participation
from over 450 Arabic language experts and educators from 18 Arab countries. In this study,

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