Field notes from teaching, AI, and the design of Strive.
Written by Simas Zurauskas. Cognitive science behind the recall queue, engineering behind the live-streaming lessons, and the product principles that shape what Strive does — and what it deliberately doesn’t.
How to study for an exam with AI without fooling yourself
AI explanations are unusually fluent, and fluency is exactly the cue we misread as knowing something. Here is the failure mode, the evidence behind it, and a protocol for using AI to prepare for a real exam on a real deadline.
Active recall vs re-reading — the 50%+ retention gap in three studies
Most people don't believe retrieval practice beats re-reading until they see the numbers. Here are the three studies that nail it down, and what to do about it on a Tuesday afternoon.
The forgetting curve, 140 years on — what Ebbinghaus still gets right
A 19th-century psychologist sat alone with a metronome and discovered the most replicated finding in cognitive psychology. Most of online learning still acts like he didn't.
Why most courses don't stick — and what spaced retrieval does about it
You finish a course feeling smart, then three weeks later most of it is gone. Here's what the research actually says about why that happens, and the design choice we built Strive around.