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6/19/25, 10:18 AM Miqyas Al Dhad Completes Arab World's Largest Field Survey Ahead of Launching First Comprehensive Scientific Framework to A…

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

Launching First Comprehensive Scientific Framework to Assess Arabic

Literacy

Tuesday, December 16, 2025/ Editor - Share
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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, participants were given two passages and had
to identify which one was more difficult. The data collected from this study was used to create rankings of difficulty for
2,000 passages. These were the basis for the machine learning algorithms of Miqyas Al Dhad readability formulae.
Pairwise study is a known methodology in the machine learning field.

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