Leveling and Sharpening

Leveling and Sharpening
Leveling and sharpening is a cognitive style that
represents the way in which an individual uses previous
memories when attempting to assimilate new information
with prior knowledge. This cognitive style
was described in the mid-1950s and was studied by
Philip Holzman and George Klein, among others.
Prior to the 1990s, the Squares Test, which was developed
by the Menninger Foundation, was one of the
methods of identifying levelers and sharpeners.
People who are levelers tend to select many memories
from the past in an attempt to clarify and categorize
newly acquired information. Sharpeners, on
the other hand, seem to select fewer memories when
processing new knowledge. In his 1997 book Cognitive
Styles and Classroom Learning, Harry Morgan contended
that, overall,sharpeners tend to have more accurate
identifications of new knowledge and can relate
recently acquired material to old material with more
specificity. This may be due to an ability to selectively
sort and store pieces of memories and to carefully differentiate
associations between past experiences. By
contrast, levelers inaccurately blend features of mem-
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ories together and then oversimplify the new material
or miscategorize it altogether. They can miss distinguishing
features among similar, yet not identical, objects.
This could result in definitions of later
knowledge that are ambiguous.