ArSciKids: Arabic Curriculum-Aligned Datasets for Scientific Experiment and Multiple-Choice Question Generation in Primary Education
Taghrid Housari, Massa Rankoussi, Jafar Abdul Majeed, Wael Tarabishi, Khloud Al Jallad, Nada Ghneim
Abstract
Despite growing interest in Arabic natural language processing, curriculum-aligned educational resources remain scarce compared with English, and few public datasets for Arabic curriculum content with structured, generation-ready annotations are available, particularly for primary-school science. We introduce ArSciKids, a collection of two Arabic datasets designed for curriculum-aligned educational content generation: (1) a scientific-experiments dataset containing 999 manually curated records from official primary-school science textbooks in Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Jordan, and (2) an assessment-question dataset containing 2,167 multiple-choice questions collected from the Saudi Manhaji educational platform. The experiment records are structured with titles, objectives, tools, procedures, observations, conclusions, keywords, and grade levels, while the assessment records contain lesson references, questions, four answer options, correct answers, and explanations. Both datasets cover grades 1-6 and consist of real-life Arabic educational content rather than machine-translated or synthetically generated material. We assess the usefulness of these resources for generation by fine-tuning ten open models spanning sub-billion to several-billion parameter scales using LoRA. Models are evaluated using automatic metrics, including ROUGE and BLEU, and answer accuracy for multiple-choice generation. Moreover, we evaluate the results using a five-criterion human evaluation protocol. The results show substantial differences across model scales and tasks. ArSciKids will be publicly available, and we hope that it provides a manually curated, structured foundation for research on Arabic educational NLP, curriculum-aware generation, and low-resource language modeling.