Read the Passage carefully and answer the questions that follow: If the vision…
2020
Read the Passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:
If the vision of the learner in the initial period was predominantly as an empty organism and in the next as an active organism, in the period that followed it was as a social organism. The beliefs regarding the nature of the learner in the first period drew heavily from the associationist view of the human being, in the second from the Gestalt and personalistic views; later they also drew from the emerging social psychological and group dynamic views.
The child as learner as envisioned as a social organism, and learning was perceived as occurring through interpersonal actions and reactions, each person in the classroom serving as a stimulus for every other person. It is hard to overemphasize the impact on the classroom of the "group climate" concepts and studies by Lewin and his associates beginning in the late 1930s, which were given added cogency by the ideological issues of World War II. Innumerable treatises, textbooks, and programs applied these ideas and findings to the classroom, and such terms as "authoritarian", "democratic", and "laissez-faire" became, for good or ill, integral parts of the educational vocabulary. Experimenters in the learning laboratory became concerned with such previously unheard-of matters as "interpersonal cohesion" and "small group processes", and teachers in the classroom with "sociometric structure" and "group dynamics".
Concomitant changes in the image of the ideal classroom could again be observed. If the child is primarily a social organism, then the objectives of his education should be primarily social in character. And if learning is a social or group process, then a circular or group-centred classroom where everyone faces everyone else (as once they had been forced to face only the teacher) is the most sensible and practical, even necessary, learning environment. And this indeed became a favourite image of the classroom.
Ques: The first vision of the child as a learner was
- A.
Personalistic
- B.
Social
- C.
Humanistic
- D.
Associationistic
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: D
Concept
In the history of educational psychology, the image of the learner shifted across periods, and each image was rooted in a then-dominant school of psychology. The earliest image treated the learner as an 'empty organism' — a blank slate whose mind is built up by linking (associating) stimuli and responses. This view comes from associationism, the doctrine that knowledge and behaviour are formed by associations between ideas or between stimulus and response.
Application
The passage maps each period to its source view in order:
First period: learner as an 'empty organism', drawing on the associationist view of the human being.
Second period: learner as an 'active organism', drawing on the Gestalt and personalistic views.
Later period: learner as a 'social organism', drawing on social-psychological and group-dynamic views.
The question asks for the source of the FIRST vision. The passage states the beliefs in the first period 'drew heavily from the associationist view of the human being.' So the first vision of the child as a learner was associationistic.
Cross-check
The text explicitly pairs the Gestalt and personalistic views with the SECOND period (the active organism) and the social-psychological/group-dynamic views with the LATER period (the social organism). A purely humanistic label is not the source the passage assigns to the first period. Reading the period-to-view mapping straight from the passage confirms the associationist view as the first.