Sidney L. Pressey facts for kids

Sidney Leavitt Pressey was a professor of psychology at Ohio State University for many years. He was born in Brooklyn, New York on December 28, 1888, and passed away on July 1, 1979. He is well-known for inventing a special teaching machine long before the idea became popular.

One quote about his invention says: "The first... [teaching machine] was developed by Sidney L. Pressey... While originally developed as a self-scoring machine... [it] demonstrated its ability to actually teach."

Pressey started working at Ohio State in 1921 and stayed there until he retired in 1959. Even after retiring, he continued to write and publish many papers. He was a cognitive psychologist, which means he believed that learning is guided by meaning, intentions, and goals, rather than just reacting to things around us. He was a cognitive psychologist even before this field became widely recognized. He also helped create the American Association of Applied Psychology and later helped it join with the APA after World War Two. In 1964, he received the first E. L. Thorndike Award. The next year, he became a founding member of the National Academy of Education. After he retired, he started a scholarship program for excellent students at Ohio State. In 1976, Ohio State named a learning building "Sidney L. Pressey Hall" in his honor.

The 'Teaching Machine'

Pressey's invention began as a device to give multiple-choice questions (MCQs) to students. MCQs are a common way to test students in the United States. Pressey's machine had a window that showed a question and four possible answers. Students would press a button for the answer they chose. The machine would record their answer and then show the next question.

The really clever part was when Pressey changed the machine so it wouldn't move to the next question until the student picked the right answer. This showed that the machine could actually teach students what the correct answers were. This was the first time someone proved that a machine could teach. It also showed that getting immediate feedback (knowing if you were right or wrong) helped people learn. This kind of feedback is very basic. Later, people found that learning improved even more when the feedback explained why an answer was right or wrong.

Pressey kept making his devices better after World War II. Many experts recognize Pressey as the original inventor of teaching machines and a key figure in programmed learning. This was long before B.F. Skinner became famous for his work in this area. Skinner himself, who made teaching machines very popular, acknowledged Pressey's earlier work in his 1958 paper.

Sidney Pressey was not happy with how teaching machines became too focused on making money. He felt that people weren't thinking enough about the basic ideas behind learning when they used these machines. He also believed that the machines' full potential wasn't being used. He even said that programmed texts were "no more learning than simple silent reading."

Pressey called his own method "adjunct autoinstruction." He thought it was important to follow learning with questions. This helped make ideas clearer and stronger in a student's mind. It also corrected misunderstandings and made sure students understood one topic before moving to a new one.

Guide to Standard Tests

One of Pressey's important but often overlooked contributions was his book, Introduction to the Use of Standard Tests: A Brief Manual in the Use of Tests of Both Ability and Achievement in the School Subjects. He wrote this book in 1922. The book's goal was to provide a guide for understanding and using tests of both skills and knowledge. It explained the basic facts about tests, how to handle test results, and what those results meant. Pressey saw that tests were being used more and more in daily life, not just by teachers but also by people who weren't specially trained in using them. So, his manual was meant to be an easy-to-understand handbook for anyone using tests.

Pressey's Main Textbook

Pressey's main textbook was called Psychology and the new education, published in 1937 and again in 1944. This book was a great example of a cognitive psychology text for future teachers. In it, he talked about how to solve teaching problems by looking closely at what students were doing.

For example, he wrote that "analyzing errors, and then doing remedial work based on that analysis, greatly improved how well students learned algebra." He also mentioned another experiment where giving students individual attention and figuring out their specific needs led to big improvements in learning vocational agriculture. Pressey shared more examples and data from these studies. A whole chapter in his book, "The nature and control of the learning process," is very important for understanding the ideas of programmed learning that became popular after World War II in the United States.

Pressey's entire approach to educational psychology was different from the ideas of B.F. Skinner and other behaviorists. Pressey believed that human learning was special and different from animal learning. He argued that things like language, numbers, and silent reading allow humans to learn in ways that even apes cannot. He felt that teaching methods should help improve these unique human abilities. He thought that some current teaching programs, based on animal studies, broke down meaningful information into small pieces and focused on simple memorization instead of helping students truly understand.

Books by Pressey

• Pressey S.L. & Pressey L.C. 1923. Introduction to the use of standard tests.
• Pressey S.L. 1933. Psychology and the new education.
  • Pressey S.L. & Robinson F.P. 1944. Psychology and the new education. Revised edition.
• Pressey S.L. & Kuhlen R.G. 1957. Psychological development through the life span.