Dubai Announces New Mandatory Triannual Literacy Assessment For School Students

The Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA) of Dubai has announced a mandatory literacy assessment for students aged 6 to 15 years old.

This standardized assessment will be held thrice a year, starting from the academic year 2023-2024, and will be conducted in all the schools in the city.

The KHDA announced on Tuesday that all students from Grades 1 to 12 will take the Reading Literacy Assessment. All students from Grades 1 to 9 will also be required to take the Arabic Benchmark Test.

"As per new KHDA guidelines, all students in the 6-15 age range are required to sit a standardized reading literacy assessment three times per year," said Peter Bonner, Assistant Principal Primary for Curriculum, Progress and Assessment of the GEMS World Academy in Dubai.

The age-appropriate assessment will cover reading skills across various domains, including phonemic awareness, word recognition and phonics, reading comprehension, fluency, vocabulary, interpretive and comparative analysis of passages, application of understanding and critique of text, and comprehension of different genres, including poetry.

"Schools have the flexibility to select a reading assessment platform and provider that is appropriate for them and their context, as long as these meet the above requirements," Bonner said.

He also explained that the assessments should be "computer-adaptive," and that the results should reflect the reading age of each student in comparison to grade/age expectations, as well as the Standard Age Scores.

Bonner said a comprehensive analysis of the assessment results, which will be shared with all stakeholders, will be used to identify the individual needs of the students and the interventions necessary to address these needs.

In a statement, Credence High School CEO-Principal Deepika Thapar Singh said the assessment should allow schools to align the assessment results with the verbal component of the cognitive ability test.

"The reading literacy assessment should be external, standardized, and reliable, and applicable for students across all curricula," she said. "These assessments should be aligned with the international definition of reading literacy, and should assess reading skills in line with those evaluated through international assessments, Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) and Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)."

A literacy assessment conducted in 2009 by the KHDA showed that Dubai could do better in reading literacy, finishing 43rd out of 65 education zones throughout the world.