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.
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.