Working Through Lessons¶
This page explains what a lesson is, what the exercises feel like, what happens when you get one wrong, and why material you already passed comes back.
What a lesson is¶
Every article in your audience's contents has a lesson: a short sequence of 5 to 9 exercises built from that article. One article, one lesson.
The two are a pair with different jobs. The article is the document you consult when you already know the material. The lesson is what makes you know it. Working through the lesson is how you finish an entry — there is no reading checkbox any more, because reading a document is not evidence that anything landed.
A lesson is meant to be finishable in one sitting.
The shape of every exercise¶
Every exercise has the same three parts, in the same order:
- The setup — a situation, a question, or an artifact to look at. It sets up your attempt; it does not teach you the answer first.
- Your attempt — you pick an option or write an answer. Nothing is revealed until you commit.
- The correction — the verdict, the right answer, and why. This is where the teaching happens.
That order is deliberate. Being told something after you have committed to an answer is what makes it stick; being told it beforehand is what makes it slide off.
The kinds of exercise¶
Mention builds a lesson out of six kinds of exercise, mixed to suit what the article actually covers. You may be asked to:
- Warm up with a guess before you are taught anything. This one is never graded and does not count toward finishing the lesson — its whole value is that you committed to a guess. Guessing wrong here costs you nothing.
- Decide what to do in a messy scenario, where the situation is realistic and the rule that applies is not signposted.
- Tell near-identical cases apart — two situations that look the same and resolve differently, including cases the rule does not cover at all.
- Find what is wrong with a plausible-looking artifact: a draft, a request, a filled-in form that breaks a rule you are supposed to have noticed.
- Reconstruct a procedure from memory, with no options in front of you.
- Explain why a rule exists, not just what it says.
A lesson has at most one warm-up, always first.
Roleplay is not one of a lesson's exercises. It is the audience's final exam — one conversation drawn across every lesson, which opens once you have finished them all.
How your answer is graded¶
There are two ways an exercise can be graded, and the exercise tells you which one you are in.
| You do | How it's graded |
|---|---|
| Pick from options | Checked instantly against the answer key. No waiting. |
| Write prose | Judged against a rubric — a short list of criteria the answer has to meet. |
For a written answer, passing means meeting every required criterion. Getting most of the way there is not a pass, and the correction tells you precisely which criteria you missed and why, drawn from the article the lesson was built from. That specificity is the point of grading this way — you get "you didn't say who signs off above the threshold," not "not quite."
Reconstructing a procedure and explaining why a rule exists are always written. Deciding what to do in a scenario can be either.
When you get one wrong¶
Nothing bad happens. There is no score, no penalty, and no limit on trying again.
What you get is the correction, naming the criteria you missed. When you retry, you don't get the same question back — you get a variant: the same material set in a different situation. If you did not understand the escalation threshold, you meet the escalation threshold again somewhere else, which is the only way to find out whether you understood it or memorized the question.
If Mention can't grade a written answer at that moment — the grader is unavailable, or your organization is out of credits — the exercise says so and stays open. That is an outage, not a verdict: your answer stays on the page exactly as you wrote it, and you submit it again in a moment. You don't get the correction for an ungraded attempt: nothing was judged, so nothing has been earned, and showing you the answer would spoil the retry.
What you are actually credited with¶
Progress attaches to the material, not to the exercise. Each exercise declares the piece of material it exercises, and passing it is what gets recorded.
Two things follow from that, both in your favor:
- If the article is rewritten and its lesson is rebuilt, the material you have already passed stays passed. You do not start over because the wording of an exercise changed.
- If your audience's owner changes how something is exercised — turning a recall exercise into a scenario, say — your progress is untouched.
You have finished a lesson when you have passed every piece of material it grades.
Learn mode and Read mode¶
Which of the two artifacts an entry opens depends on where you are.
| When | What the entry opens | |
|---|---|---|
| Learn mode | You haven't finished this article's lesson | The lesson, one exercise at a time |
| Read mode | You have finished the lesson | The whole article |
You do not switch this yourself and it is not a setting — it follows your progress. Neither mode withholds anything: the article is reference material you may need at any point, so it is always readable by its own link. What the mode decides is which half an entry is asking of you.
A lesson is an open-book test. An exercise written from a passage of the article offers you that passage under Look it up. Opening it costs nothing, is not recorded, and does not affect your mastery. Finding the right material and applying it is a real part of the job, and that is what a lesson practises. Recall without the document is what review checks — which is why review items have no such button.
For the same reason, glossary terms are linked throughout a lesson: in the scenario and the question, in the passage under Look it up, and in the correction you get after answering. Hover or tap one and the definition opens in place, exactly as it does in an article. See The Glossary. Review is the exception — the question itself is not linked there, because a definition on hover is part of what review is checking. Corrections in a review are still linked, since those come after you have committed.
Read mode is not permanent, but only one thing takes it back: if the article is rewritten and its lesson grows material you have never been asked about, the entry returns to Learn mode for the part you have not done. Material you already passed stays passed. Time alone never does this — that is what review is for.
Audience owners are always in Read mode for the audiences they own.
Review, and why material comes back¶
Finishing a lesson is not the end of it. Material you have passed comes back on a fixed schedule:
1 day → 3 days → 7 days → 21 days → 60 days.
Pass a piece of material when it comes back and you move up a rung, so you see it again after a longer gap. Fail it and you drop to the first rung and start climbing again. That is the whole rule — there is nothing to rate, and no difficulty slider to set.
Review draws from everything you have finished in an audience, so a review item may come back as a different kind of exercise than the one that first taught it. Material you learned by reconstructing a procedure can come back as a scenario. That is deliberate: knowing something only in the form you were first asked about it is not knowing it.
To actually do a review, open the audience's Hub — when something is due, Start reviewing appears as your next-action card. A review is a short run of items — one question, one answer, a correction, then the next. Unlike a lesson there is no second attempt at an item: a miss is recorded, drops that material to the first rung, and it comes back in the next review rather than being re-asked here. Your place is kept, so you can leave halfway and pick the same run up later. When the run ends you get a summary of what moved and when each piece comes back. Review items are never warm-ups — an item is one question with one answer.
If Mention cannot grade a written answer, it tells you so and leaves your words exactly where you typed them — that is an outage, not a verdict, and the item stays open for you to submit again.
This is also why an audience can stop being finished. You are current in an audience when you have finished everything in it and nothing in it is overdue. Finishing everything once makes you complete; coming back when things fall due keeps you current. See Tracking Your Progress.
When an exercise is wrong¶
If an exercise rests on a claim you believe is factually wrong or out of date, tell your audience's owner. The same goes for a rubric you think marked you unfairly — the owner can edit it.
Lessons in an agent¶
Lessons work through the Mention MCP server as well as in the web app. A connected agent poses one exercise at a time, takes your answer, submits it, and teaches from the verdict it gets back — and once every lesson is finished it can run the audience's final exam, which is arguably better in conversation than on a screen. The agent doesn't know the answer key or the rubric either; nobody sees those until the attempt is graded.
Review works there too: ask a connected agent what you owe an audience and it draws the session, runs it item by item, and records the same progress the web app records.
Lessons are not on mobile yet. The mobile app keeps the reading experience only. See Reading on Mobile.