Sidney L. Pressey

**Sidney L. Pressey** (Brooklyn, New York, 1888  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.

- "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".

## Career

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 was the first winner of the E.L. Thorndike Award for achievements in educational technology, in 1964. This is an award of the American Psychological Association.

## Early readability formula

In 1923, Pressey and a co-worker published the first reading ease formula. They had been concerned that science textbooks in junior high school had so many technical words. They felt that teachers spent all class time explaining their meaning. They argued that their formula would help to measure and reduce the “vocabulary burden” of textbooks. Their formula, based on the Thorndike word list, took three hours to apply to a single book. It was a measure of vocabulary difficulty. Many later formulae made use of some measure of sentence complexity as well as vocabulary. These are the two main causes of text difficulty or 'readability'.

## The 'teaching machine'

Pressey's idea started as a machine for administering multiple-choice questions to students. These were (and are still) a basic method for testing students in the U.S.A.. The 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 the second arrangement taught the students what 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.

A number of reviews credit Pressey with being the founder of programmed learning and teaching machines, long before the better known efforts of B.F. Skinner. Skinner was, however, responsible for bringing the whole subject into popular view, and his critique of the limitations of traditional classroom teaching is a classic work.

## Works

- Pressey S.L. & Pressey L.C. 1923. _Introduction to the use of standard tests_. Harrap.
- Pressey S.L. & Pressey L.C. 1927. _Mental abnormality and deficiency_. Macmillan.
- Pressey S.L. 1933. _Psychology and the new education_. Harper.
    - Pressey S.L. & Robinson F.P. 1944. _Psychology and the new education_. Revised edition, Harper.
- Pressey S.L. & Janney J.E. 1937. _Casebook of research in education_. Harper.
- Pressey S.L; Janney J.E. & Kuhlen R.G. 1939. _Life: a psychological survey_. Harper.
- Pressey S.L. & Kuhlen R.G. 1957. _Psychological development through the life span. Harper & Row._.
- Pressey S.L; Robinson F.P & Horrocks J.E. 1959. _Psychology in education_. Harper.

### Autobiographies

- Pressey, Sidney L. 1967. Autobiography. In _A history of psychology in autobiography_, vol 5. eds Edward G. Boring and Gardner Lindzey. New York: Appleton-Century-Croft.
- Pressey, Sidney L. 1971. Sidney Leavitt Pressey, Part I: An autobiography. In _Leaders in American education_, ed. Robert J. Havighurst. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.