Put this phrase into the correct grammatical form: während des aktiven Abrufs
For when you're worried your efforts won't be enough…
We developed a technical process that enables a new kind of learning:
Each time you’re challenged to respond correctly,your effort succeeds—within that very attempt.
Try it for yourself…
Why This Matters
For decades, research has shown that actively generating or retrieving a response generally produces substantially stronger, longer-lasting learning than simply taking in the corresponding information. And within this kind of learning, greater challenge—so long as the response remains successful—can strengthen learning still further. Yet the possibility of failure has long been taken for granted as inherent in challenge: the greater the challenge, the greater the possibility of failing. With that possibility come familiar costs: anxiety, frustration, embarrassment, self-doubt, loss of motivation, and avoidance of such challenges.
This creates a fundamental bind: the very conditions that can make learning more powerful can also make it aversive enough to undermine—or even prevent—the learning they are meant to strengthen.
Progressive Hinting
What you experienced in the demo subtly breaks this relationship. You begin challenged to bring the answer to mind and produce it yourself, just as when tested. If you can, you do—and nothing more is needed. But when you cannot yet respond, target information gradually becomes clearer until you can, allowing the challenge to continue without the attempt ending in failure. When you have nothing to draw on, support continues until the answer is fully revealed. Yet wherever your existing knowledge can help, you still do the essential work of generation or retrieval: the answer is not simply given to you; you must produce it yourself, with only as much help as you need to succeed.
AnswerSense®
Progressive Hinting is a patent-protected technical process. AnswerSense® puts it into ready-to-use forms. During each learning attempt, it:
- Allows you to respond without support – so that, when you can, you succeed entirely on your own.
- Gradually increases support for producing the target response – so that, when you need help, you receive enough to succeed.
- Suspends that increase while you respond – so it doesn’t give you more help than you need.
- Resumes the increase if you stop before completing a correct response – so starting too soon never leaves you without enough help to succeed.
- Requires a correct response to complete the attempt – so you finish by producing it yourself.
- Confirms your correct response by presenting the full target information – so you can be sure your attempt was successful.
- Records how soon you began responding and how long you took to finish – helping assess how readily and fluently you responded.
- Records how much support you needed to respond correctly – so your performance can be measured even where a conventional test would register only failure.
Together, these enable a learning interaction in which you’re challenged to produce each response and progressively supported only as needed—all within a single attempt that ends in success. Your own responding determines how much support, if any, you receive. The effortful challenge that can make learning stronger and longer-lasting remains. But now each attempt draws you into the effort to succeed with as little help as possible. Success brings the intrinsic reward of overcoming the challenge—and the less help you need, the greater the satisfaction.
Explore AnswerSense® ProductsNote
Progressive Hinting does not provide a succession of separate, countable hints or clues about the target response. Instead, a representation of the target response itself gradually changes, allowing increasingly more information to be gleaned from it. When creating learning items, there's no need to think up or sequence clues.
A learning item may contain several challenges in succession, but each challenge involves just one target response and one continuous attempt to produce it—not a series of incorrect responses followed by feedback and retries. Errors made while entering a response can be corrected within that same attempt.
The Challenge of Spacing
The more challenging it is to bring a response to mind, the more a successful attempt generally strengthens learning. This makes the edge of forgetting a valuable target: the point where the demand to produce that response reaches the limits of what you can bring to mind.
A long-established method called “spacing” approaches this boundary by allowing time to pass between retrieval attempts. It is one of several ways—including interleaving—to make producing a response more challenging.
Many memory apps emphasize the sophistication of their spacing algorithms. These algorithms typically use patterns of successful and unsuccessful recall to adjust intervals, sometimes supplemented by the learner’s own ratings of difficulty. Consistently successful recall can prompt longer intervals, while failures help determine when intervals should be shortened. Failure is thus part of how these systems regulate their scheduling.
AnswerSense® uses a spacing algorithm, too, but Progressive Hinting provides a different measure: how much support you needed to succeed. How soon you began responding and how long your response took provide further information—even when you needed no support. Your responding supplies this information through the interaction itself, without requiring the attempt to end in failure or asking you for a separate judgment of its difficulty. This preserves distinctions in performance even where conventional retrieval attempts would all register as failures.
Whatever measure an algorithm uses, however, the interval it selects for an individual learning attempt remains a rough estimate. An app can draw on the task, your recorded performance, and other observable signals. But these offer only a narrow window onto the many interacting physiological, cognitive, emotional, and environmental factors that determine how readily you can retrieve a particular response at a particular moment. The app may therefore present a task while the response still comes easily—or when you can no longer produce it unaided. In conventional retrieval practice, the latter can bring the frustration, anxiety, and discouragement described earlier.
Progressive Hinting accommodates this uncertainty within the attempt itself. If you can respond unaided, you do. If you cannot, support gradually increases until you can, with your responding determining how far it progresses. Just beyond the boundary, a little support may be enough; farther beyond it, more is available. What was a cliff between success and failure becomes a graded range of support leading to successful responding.
This makes it easier to pursue highly challenging retrieval without having to predict exactly where that boundary lies. Spacing helps establish the challenge; Progressive Hinting supports you through to success when the interval overshoots. The support required then provides information for adjusting future intervals. Predicting the ideal retrieval interval is inherently uncertain, but with Progressive Hinting, an imperfectly timed challenge can still become a demanding, rewarding, successful learning event.
AnswerSense® Products
AnswerSense® brings Progressive Hinting into different learning settings—from dedicated practice to the materials you read, the AI you interact with, and the ways your performance is assessed.
AnswerSense® Sequential
Beyond flashcards: the first learning app to implement Progressive Hinting.
Create and organize your learning material, then practice through a sequence of challenges. AnswerSense® Sequential brings the interaction you experienced above into your own learning—with Progressive Hinting supporting you through to success on each attempt.
Select a control to explore what you can do in the app.
Take on the challenge—with the support to succeed
Work with displayed text and text-to-speech, locate targets in images, and reconstruct formulas and equations—with Progressive Hinting supporting your responses. Practice with individual or grouped items, in chosen sequences or shuffled.
No account required.
In the app, long-press any control or symbol for an explanation tailored to its current state—including why an action may be unavailable.
Preparing for release.
Ask About AvailabilityAnswerSense® Highlight
Turn the text you highlight into powerful, interactive learning.
What you highlight is usually something you want to remember. AnswerSense® Highlight turns your selections into challenges that ask you to bring those contents to mind and produce them yourself—with Progressive Hinting providing only as much support as you need to succeed.
When integrated into a publisher’s reader, Highlight brings this interaction directly into the text you’re reading: you choose what matters and practice producing it in context.
Standalone version nearing completion; release date to be announced.
AnswerSense® Embedded
Experience Progressive Hinting directly within your learning materials.
Active learning need not wait until the exercises at the end of a chapter. AnswerSense® Embedded lets publishers and learning-platform providers build challenges directly into the material itself. A passage or diagram can invite you to test your understanding, make a prediction, or complete a line of reasoning—with Progressive Hinting supporting you through to success.
The underlying technology is ready. Its integration can be tailored to your content and platform.
For publisher and platform integration.
AnswerSense® AI
From information you take in to challenges you master.
AnswerSense® AI is designed to keep explanations, context, and guidance directly available, while turning material you want to learn into challenges that require you to produce the responses yourself—with Progressive Hinting providing only as much support as you need to succeed.
The aim is to draw on AI’s breadth of knowledge and flexibility to shape learning challenges around your subject, goals, and current understanding—making active generation and retrieval part of the exchange itself.
Proof-of-concept work planned for November.
AnswerSense® Assess
Beyond right or wrong: a richer picture of learning.
Two learners may both be unable to answer a conventional test question, yet differ considerably in how much support would enable them to succeed. AnswerSense® Assess is designed to combine these differences with normalized response timing and duration to provide a differentiated measure of production fluency—even where unaided responding is not yet possible.
Planned research focuses on adapting Progressive Hinting specifically for assessment through calibrated support progression, controlled perceptual conditions, and appropriate normalization of the measures. It also addresses reliability, construct validity, and predictive validity—including how the measures relate to later learning and performance.
Research stage. Collaborations welcome.
Professional Inquiries
For publishers, learning-platform developers, educational institutions, training providers, in-house training teams, and researchers.
Enlumen warmly welcomes your inquiries about theoretical and methodological implications, applications in your field, supported learning and response formats, integration with existing content and systems, technical implementation, and licensing and collaboration.
Contact EnlumenAbout Enlumen
Enlumen GmbH was founded to tackle fundamental problems in learning and reasoning—and to turn promising solutions into technology people can actually use. Its aim is to develop advances whose benefits extend across subjects and settings, improving both what people can achieve and their experience of getting there.
Enlumen’s founder, Dr. Guido Schauer, is a cognitive scientist with a PhD in cognitive psychology from UCLA. He studied reasoning under Keith Holyoak and was also a member of Robert and Elizabeth Bjork’s renowned learning and memory lab. His research focused on developing a theoretical account of variability in human reasoning and on how training might improve it.
Designing and programming interactive experiments was central to that research. Together with decades of teaching, this work shaped an approach that connects theoretical understanding with the details of what a person sees, does, and experiences. That connection continues in Enlumen’s work: from identifying a problem and developing an underlying process to shaping the interaction and building the technology that puts it into practice.
Progressive Hinting and AnswerSense® are the first expression of this purpose. Through its own products and licensing to other providers, Enlumen seeks to make these advances broadly available, including within the materials and platforms people already use. Its commitments are to carefully made products, honest communication, and meaningful, lasting benefits for learners. The company exists to make those benefits possible—and to extend their reach.