Sidney Pressey (1888-1979) was an American psychologist known as the "father of the teaching machine." He invented the first teaching machine in the 1920s, decades before B.F. Skinner popularized the concept. Pressey's original machine presented multiple choice questions to students through a window and recorded their answers. It provided feedback by not advancing until the correct answer was chosen, demonstrating how feedback causes learning. Pressey continued improving teaching machines and advocated for their ability to individualize instruction. However, his ideas were ahead of his time and teaching machines did not gain widespread adoption until later in the 20th century.

1. Sidney L.
Pressey (1888–
1979)
Jammu University
2 Year B.Ed.
Paper 202
Sem: II
Unit: I
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Dr. Atul Thakur

2. Sidney L. Pressey (1888–1979)
Father of the teaching machine,
author of the first book on standardized
testing,
founder of the Division on Adult
Development and Aging of the American
Psychological Association,
an innovator

3. Biography:
 Pressey was born in Brooklyn, New York
 father was a minister in Church and his mother was a teacher
 family moved to a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, where he spent
most of his childhood and youth
 received his B.A. from Williams College
 majored in American history, a course in social psychology led him
to attend graduate school at Harvard University in 1912.
 At Harvard he studied with several notables, Robert M. Yerkes
chief among them.
 With Yerkes's assistance, Pressey became an intern at Boston
Psychopathic Hospital while still in graduate school.
 During his internship he met Luella Cole who, for fifteen years,
would be his wife and collaborator.
 After receiving his doctoral degree in 1917, Pressey obtained an
appointment as a special research assistant at Indiana University.

4.  After four years, he accepted an invitation to Ohio State University
as an assistant professor and remained on the faculty of Ohio State
for the next thirty-eight years, achieving the rank of full professor
in 1926 and retiring from the university in 1959.
 During his retirement, Pressey remained very productive,
authoring eighteen papers between 1959 and 1967.
 Pressey was rather unique because he grounded his research in the
problems that he encountered on a daily basis, rather than in theory
or prior research.
 This "grounding" was evident very early in his career. While
interning at Boston Psychopathic Hospital he studied ways of
empirically differentiating among psychotics, alcoholics, and
"feebleminded" individuals.
 During his four years as a research assistant at Indiana University,
he began studying children whom modern psychologists would
term as having below normal IQs, but soon became interested in
those possessing superior abilities.

5.  This research led to the publication of several journal articles and
Introduction to the Use of Standard Tests. Following World War II,
he returned to this line of research and published Educational
Acceleration: Appraisals and Basic Problems.
 By "acceleration" Pressey suggests a means of accommodating the
needs of academically gifted students.
 During his initial years on the faculty at Ohio State University, he
was concerned with the quality of graduate education, particularly
the teaching of psychology.
 He investigated the study methods used by superior and failing
students in an attempt to identify the most effective and least
effective methods.
 He designed a teacher education program, the central feature of
which was a project involving actual work in the school or with
young people.
 Finally, as he aged, he began to study aging.

6.  reflected on his experiences with the experiences of those he
had studied at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital
 writing became more personalized and introspective.
 initiated the first American Psychological Association
division–on maturity and old age–in 1945 to 1946.
 Although Pressey's impact on educational thought and practice
was substantial, it could have been even greater had he not
been so far ahead of his time in so many respects.
 Pressey invented and patented the first teaching machine in
1924, fully thirty years before B. F. Skinner's popularization of
teaching machines.

7.  Skinner based his machine on the behaviorist theory
of learning that was prevalent at the time, and Pressey
was amazed by the learning theorists' ignorance of the
body of research concerning learning in school.
 He criticized Skinner and his associates for applying
concepts derived primarily from rats that had learned
to run mazes and students who had memorized pairs
of letter combinations.
 Pressey 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.

8. The ‘teaching machine’
 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
 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.

9.  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.

10. Pressey's own term was "adjunct
autoinstruction".
He thought it important to follow learning by
questions "to enhance the clarity and stability
of cognitive structure by correcting
misapprehensions, and deferring the
instruction of new matter until there had been
such clarification and elucidation".
The topic itself might be programmed, or it
might not.

11. The First Golden Age: Sidney L.
Pressey - 1920’s - early 1930’s
Typewriter size with a window that displayed a
question and four answers.
A drum with paper attached rotates and exposes
material in the window.
Multiple-choice question with four alternatives
labeled 1 through 4.
On the side were four corresponding keys that
the student pressed to input their answer.
Test mode, the student pressed the key to the
corresponding answer. The machine recorded
the response on a counter and then
automatically advanced the next question.

12.  Teaching mode: user raises a lever on the back of the
machine This prevented the machine from moving
to the next question until the student had correctly
answered the current question Multiple attempts at
the answer, until the right answer was chosen All of
the key presses were recorded and counted on the
mechanical counter in the back of the machine.
 Reinforcement: An additional attachment could be
fitted to the machine It dropped a small piece of
candy into a container, if the student made the right
amount of responses that had been set on the “reward
dial” With the use of this attachment, the student
was automatically rewarded when he/she reached the
preset goal.

13.  Pressey’s 2nd machine
 Drum Tutor would add a few new features
 an error window that displayed a cumulative count of
the errors (the key presses)
 When a wrong choice made, the error count increased by
one and the question remained in the item window
 This indicated to the student to try again with another
different response to the question
 If the choice was correct, the machine automatically
displayed the next question in the item window and the
error count remained unchanged
 Therefore, the student immediately knew whether his
answer was right or wrong, as well as how many times it
took to correctly answer the questions.

14.  Unique feature of dropping a question from the testing
routine once it had been correctly answered twice in
succession.
 When a student pressed the right key, the drum revolved
and turned up a new question.
 the machine presented: ... the questions in order and
[went] through the series the second, third or further
number of times.
 After the series had been gone through twice, the
machine revolved past those questions, which had been
answered correctly without the pressing of a wrong key.
 In addition, as an item was learned to the point where
two successive right answers are made, it is thus thrown
out.

15. Finally, after every item has been mastered,
the apparatus automatically stops and releases
a small coupon, indicative of the fact that the
exercise had been mastered.
Pressey’s teaching machine failed to capture
the attention of the public.
The machines promised a faster educational
pace and the need for fewer teachers at the
time of the Great Depression when more jobs,
such as teachers, were needed.