Year 4 pupils in the UAE are the best readers among their peers in the GCC and their literacy skills are only improving, according to the latest results of an international test.
The UAE ranked first in the GCC and 40th among 50 countries that participated last year in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls). The test included 12 reading passages and about 180 items used to measure literary and informational reading comprehension among public and private school pupils on a scale from 300 to 700 points.
With a Pirls 2016 score of 450, the UAE was also the top participating Arab country from the Mena region, outperforming Bahrain (446), Qatar (442), Saudi Arabia (430), Iran (428), Oman (418), Kuwait (393), Morocco (358) and Egypt (330). The UAE improved its score by 11 points compared with five years ago.
More than 300, 000 pupils, aged nine and 10, across the world participated in Pirls 2016, including 16, 471 children from public and private schools in the UAE. The test is issued once every five years.
Dubai and Abu Dhabi each elected to participate in the assessment as a "benchmarking participant" - a classification for "subnational entities" that includes Canadian provinces, US states and UAE emirates.
Dubai's public and private school pupils raised the emirate's score by 39 points to a mark of 515, exceeding the Pirls average for the first time since it began participating in the test in 2011.
When accounting for the achievement of just private schools, Dubai's performance is even better. As the Knowledge and Human Development Authority announced earlier this month, private schools in Dubai scored 527, an improvement of 37 points from 2011. A total of 6, 600 pupils from 147 private schools in Dubai participated in the test.
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