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".