Sidney L. Pressey

Sidney Leavitt Pressey (28 December 1888 to 21 July 1979) was an American psychologist and for many years a professor of psychology at Ohio State University, where he worked from 1921 until he retired in 1959. He is famous for having invented a teaching machine many years before the idea became popular. It began as a device for administering multiple-choice questions, and when he arranged it so that it would not move on until the student chose the right answer, it showed that a machine could teach and that knowledge of results was a cause of learning. Described as a cognitive psychologist, he rejected a view of learning as an accumulation of responses governed by environmental stimuli in favor of one governed by meaning, intention and purpose. He helped create the American Association of Applied Psychology, received the first E. L. Thorndike Award in 1964, and became a charter member of the National Academy of Education in 1965.