Sidney L. Pressey

Sidney Leavitt Pressey (Brooklyn, New York, December 28, 1888 – July 1, 1979) was Professor of Psychology at Ohio State University for many years. He is famous for having invented a teaching machine many years before the idea became popular.

Pressey joined Ohio State in 1921, and stayed there until he retired in 1959. He continued publishing after retirement, with 18 papers between 1959 and 1967. He was a cognitive psychologist who "rejected a view of learning as an accumulation of responses governed by environmental stimuli in favor of one governed by meaning, intention, and purpose". In fact, he had been a cognitive psychologist his entire life, well before the "mythical birthday of the cognitive revolution in psychology".

Pressey's idea started as a machine for administering multiple-choice questions (MCQs) to students. MCQs were (and are still) a basic method for testing students in the United States. Pressey's machine had a window with a question and four answers. The student pressed the key to the chosen answer. The machine recorded the answer on a counter to the back of the machine, and showed the next question.

The great idea was to fix the machine so that it would not move on until the student chose the right answer. Then it was easy to show that this second arrangement taught the students which were the right answers. This was the first demonstration that a machine could teach, and also a demonstration that knowledge of results was the cause of the learning. This kind of feedback to the learner is basic: it just tells the learner whether they are right or not. Later work on other kinds of learning material showed that even better results were got when the feedback contained more explanatory material.

Pressey continued to improve his devices after World War II, and the papers of Pressey and his colleagues are reprinted in a leading sourcebook.

A number of reviews credit Pressey with being the originator of teaching machines, and of important aspects of programmed learning. This was long before the better known efforts of B.F. Skinner. The review by Klaus gave a special appreciation of Pressey and his work. Skinner, who was responsible for bringing the whole subject into popular view, acknowledged Pressey's work in his 1958 paper on teaching machines.

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