PISA gap: Mallorca teacher backs paper reading
Balearic pupils are below Spain’s average in reading, maths and science in PISA 2025. On 13 September, Mallorca teacher and researcher Antoni Ballester called for more reading on paper and more writing in schools, starting from the age of three. Calvià Town Hall said he believes the change can strengthen the way pupils learn.
Ballester wants pupils to write freely rather than work from tightly prescribed models or heavily directed instructions. New ideas, he says, need to connect with what a pupil already knows, be understood and then used in real situations.
Learning instead of memorising
His approach is based on meaningful learning: linking new classroom material to existing knowledge so that it is understood and retained, rather than repeatedly memorised. The theory was formulated by David Ausubel and later developed and spread by Joseph D. Novak of Cornell University.
Novak also created concept maps, which help pupils build links between fresh material and what they already know. Ballester’s own method uses open tasks with no single fixed answer. The teacher still sets the direction, while pupils make choices and progress according to their abilities.
From Calvià classrooms to other countries
Ballester began researching the approach in 1991 for his doctoral thesis, working in two primary-school classrooms in the Galatzó urbanisation in Calvià, Mallorca. The work later grew into a group of teachers from different subjects and school stages led by Ballester.
The project ran for six years at the Seminar for Meaningful Learning at the University of the Balearic Islands’ Institute of Education Sciences. Specialists linked to Novak in the United States, the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the University of the Balearic Islands and the Public University of Navarre contributed to the research.
Ballester says a Canary Islands government programme used the method in more than 100 schools and with more than 1,000 pupils. Pass rates there were between 95 and 97 per cent, while behaviour problems fell significantly, according to figures he supplied. He has also documented its use in the Balearics, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, Argentina and China.
Source: Europa Press / Mallorca.com