Saudi Gazette report

RIYADH — As many as 29,133 male and female students were chosen as gifted students for the year 2025. The Ministry of Education and the King Abdulaziz and His Companions Foundation for Giftedness and Creativity (Mawhiba) announced the results of the 15th edition of the National Program for Gifted Identification in a ceremony held in Riyadh on Wednesday. The ceremony was held in the presence of Minister of Education Yousef Al-Bunyan.

These students were chosen from among a total of 79,965 students who took the assessment out of a total number of registered 88,431 male and female students from various regions of the Kingdom. The program is organized annually by the Mawhiba Foundation in strategic partnership with the Ministry of Education and the Education and Training Evaluation Commission represented by the National Center for Assessment (Qiyas).

The program, in which male and female students took the Mawhiba Scale for Multiple Mental Abilities, aims to discover gifted students in the fields of science and technology, develop an integrated system and a comprehensive methodology to identify gifted students, achieve justice and fairness in selecting gifted students, and direct them to the appropriate care program.

Data issued by Mawhiba Foundation showed that the number of students discovered this year reached 29,133, and they include 2,045 exceptional talents and 27,088 gifted students, in addition to 37,479 promising students with talent. Work is underway to nominate them for the programs and services provided according to the program standards and requirements, and they will join their colleagues from previous years, so that the number of those discovered since the launch of the program exceeds 244,000 gifted male and female students.

This year, the scale was performed in the first level, which includes grades (third, fourth and fifth primary), by 27,024 male and female students, and in the second level, grades (sixth primary, first and second intermediate), by 27,650 male and female students, while students in the third level (third intermediate and first secondary) recorded 25,291 of the total students who sat for the ability test.

The Mawhiba Scale for Multiple Mental Abilities includes several pivotal elements, including mental flexibility, mathematical and spatial reasoning, scientific and mechanical reasoning, linguistic reasoning and reading comprehension. Students are allowed to perform the scale in both Arabic and English, through more than 100 computerized locations for targeted students from the third primary grade to the first secondary grade. The number of male and female students who sat for the test during the period spanning over 15 years accounted for more than 690,000.

Mawhiba seeks to build a comprehensive and detailed database for gifted students in the Kingdom, and contribute to raising community awareness of the characteristics of gifted students and the importance of discovering them, as well as contributing to enriching scientific research sources and the Arab library, in relation to the field of identifying gifted students. This announcement comes as a culmination of joint efforts between the Ministry of Education, Mawhiba, and the Education and Training Evaluation Commission, which seeks to discover, nurture, and develop the capabilities of gifted students and provide them with the appropriate environment for innovation and creativity, with the aim of enabling them to achieve scientific leadership and raise the name of the Kingdom globally.

The National Program for Gifted Identification is a gateway to research and enrichment programs, and helps in qualification, training and development after the discovery stage, in addition to Mawhiba classes, and a number of local and international programs held throughout the year or during the summer every year, in partnership between Mawhiba and a large number of ministries, various government sectors, and major companies.

It is noteworthy that Mawhiba has invested since its inception in building specialized scientific curricula and many enrichment activities in the fields of science, technology, engineering, mathematics and others, to provide them to students at all educational levels in partnership with a number of international expertise houses in accordance with the latest global practices.