Sidney Leavitt Pressey (Brooklyn, New York, December 28, 1888 – July 1, 1979) was professor of psychology at Ohio State University for many years.
In 1976, Ohio State named a learning resource building Sidney L. Pressey Hall.
[11] A number of reviews credit Pressey with being the originator of teaching machines, and of important aspects of programmed learning.
[14] Skinner, who was responsible for bringing the whole subject into popular view, acknowledged Pressey's work in his 1958 paper on teaching machines.
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".
[19] Pressey's major textbook Psychology and the new education, 1937 and 1944,[20] is a prototypical cognitive text for student teachers.
He writes (p369) of a diagnostic attack on teaching problems: Pressey goes on to quote more published examples, and gives the data from some of these studies.
Pressey's whole approach to educational psychology ran in opposition to the influence of B.F. Skinner and the behaviorists, as this quotation illustrates: