Compare and contrast the key principles of associationist and social Essay

Compare and contrast the key principles of associationist and social constructivist theories and their implications for learning and teaching in the classroom - Essay Example t theory has been the basis for today’s organizations and associations and carefully outlines the way in which they carry out their daily processes (George L. Hersey, 1972). The associationists believe that the human mind is simply a concoction of vital elements that are governed by some automatic mechanisms. These automatic mechanisms are nothing but the associations that are being discussed in the present context. In fact, Hume had once said that As such, the degree of association is pretty atomic as well as mechanical in nature. The theory of Associationism has a number of principles that have largely worked towards making it an effective theory despite differing opinions of individual intellectuals. The primary facet of Associationism is that the association between the mental elements is built up by the mind through constant learning from experience, wherein all such experiences are molded into a set of basic beliefs and ideas. All of these ideas are elementary in nature and are rather unstructured and independent from each other. In order to define complex ideas, subsets of these simple and unstructured ideas (which are now rules guiding the individual in decision making) are used to build up a solution for such a complex idea (George L. Hersey, 1972). As such, it can be seen that Associationism is plainly an attempt by the mind to reconstruct and develop the human mind based on experiences through the individual senses. As all such rules are constructed through experience, there is very little space for theoretical assumptions and such associations are therefore a concatenation of a number of individual ideas that have been built up over time. The solution built up by the resulting association is what projects a systematic picture of the mind and its beliefs. The Social Constructivism theory is a theory pertaining to the study of knowledge that details on how specific social phenomena evolve within different situations and social contexts. As such, a