The need to guarantee quality and continually improving it, in educating our children is of paramount concern. To have a common ‘universal scale’ that is acknowledged internationally with regards to quality can help us address this concern. We realize that many practical problems of quality assurance involve the use of ordinal scales. In an ordinal environment, the concept of distance between two generic levels of the same scale is not defined. Therefore, a population (universe) of judgments cannot be described using “traditional” statistical distributions since they are based on the notion of distance. The concept of “distribution shape” cannot be defined as well. In this project, we introduce a new graphical entity, the so-called ordinal distribution, to describe a population of judgments expressed on an ordinal scale namely Quality Range. Thus, the goal of this project is to provide a scale called IQRA – International Quality Range Assessment – for Islamic Education. IQRA is unique because it develops assessment items which are not directly linked to the school curriculum. The items are designed to assess, to what extent students at the end of compulsory education, have accomplished the desired educational outcomes in terms of applying their knowledge to real-life situations and be equipped for full participation in society. Starting from the year 2016, every year, sixteen-year-old students from schools worldwide, take tests in key areas of the desired educational outcomes. IQRA is an ongoing survey. Countries and economies participating in successive surveys can compare their students’ performance, in graphical form, overtime and assess the impact on education policy decisions.

A group of experts from the Research and Development Unit IKRAM-MUSLEH, joined efforts with the educational assessment experts from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Universiti Utara Malaysia and the Malaysian Examination Syndicate. They embarked on a project to design a form of description on the performance of our children’s abilities in their educational journey. This initiative is known as the IQRA Project.

The members of this group are