Cracking the Code | What Learning Really Is, and How to Master It
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SU Student Success Initiative Series: Episode Four.
Recorded on Friday 21 August 2026.
You have been studying since Grade 1. Somewhere along the way, did anyone actually teach you how learning works? Most students arrive at university with habits built for school, discover those habits no longer hold, and conclude the problem is them. This conversation is about the hidden logic underneath studying, and the people whose job it is to understand it.
Jacolette Kloppers hosts the fourth in a series of 15 conversations on Lunch Club, joined by Dr Melanie Petersen, Programme Manager: Student Access and Success; Dr Simbongile Ntwasa and Ms Claudia Swart-Jansen van Vuuren, advisers in the Centre for Teaching and Learning; Dr Chrishar Rock, lecturer in the Department of Curriculum Studies in the Faculty of Education; and Jordan Dart, a final-year BA (Humanities) student and Vice-Chairperson of the Academic Affairs Council for 2025/2026.
What we cover in this episode:
- The layer you never see: Dr Petersen explains that student success is built in layers, each catching something different. One is about you as a person and what is happening outside the lecture hall. One is about your path through the degree. And one, which students experience every day without noticing, is the teaching itself: how a module is designed, how an assessment is built, whether lecturers are trained to teach and not only to know their subject. A well-designed assessment does not help a student who is drowning outside the classroom, which is why the layers cannot work in isolation.
- Assessment that measures learning, not memory: Dr Rock strips the jargon off "transformative assessment" and draws the line between a test that checks what you memorised and one that tells you whether you actually learned something.
- Feedback as data, not verdict: Most students read a mark as a judgement. Dr Rock makes the case for reading feedback as information about your own learning, and explains why reflective practice, thinking about how you think, is what makes learning stick.
- Why teaching someone else changes what you know: Dr Ntwasa coordinates peer-to-peer facilitation training and unpacks what shifts in your own understanding the moment you have to explain something to a peer. He also addresses the most persistent misconception about what peer facilitators are actually there to do.
- Extended Curriculum Programmes: The standard three-year pathway does not work for everyone. Dr Ntwasa discusses whether the value of that extra time is really about pace, or about something deeper in how learning needs to happen.
- PREDAC, SoTL, and the training your lecturers get: Ms Swart-Jansen van Vuuren explains what the Professional Educational Development for Academics course and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning actually involve, what separates a good lecturer from one whose students genuinely succeed, and the one thing lecturers learn about how students learn that would change how you prepare for a test.
- Why first year decides so much: The case for why the first year determines whether a student ever properly learns how to learn, rather than only how to cope, and what teaching support looks like in a high-stakes faculty like Law.
- The student view from the Academic Affairs Council: Jordan Dart on the most common student complaint that traces back to a misunderstanding of how assessment works rather than real unfairness, the study habits he has to un-teach in his workshops, and the moment in his own degree when he realised he had been studying hard without actually learning.
Where to find support:
Visit www.sun.ac.za, click "Students", then "Support", then "Student Success".
Email studysuccess@sun.ac.za and the CSCD will contact you within 24 hours to connect you with the right support.
Stream MFM 92.6: www.mfm.co.za
Follow us on socials: @mfm926
Recorded on Friday 21 August 2026.
You have been studying since Grade 1. Somewhere along the way, did anyone actually teach you how learning works? Most students arrive at university with habits built for school, discover those habits no longer hold, and conclude the problem is them. This conversation is about the hidden logic underneath studying, and the people whose job it is to understand it.
Jacolette Kloppers hosts the fourth in a series of 15 conversations on Lunch Club, joined by Dr Melanie Petersen, Programme Manager: Student Access and Success; Dr Simbongile Ntwasa and Ms Claudia Swart-Jansen van Vuuren, advisers in the Centre for Teaching and Learning; Dr Chrishar Rock, lecturer in the Department of Curriculum Studies in the Faculty of Education; and Jordan Dart, a final-year BA (Humanities) student and Vice-Chairperson of the Academic Affairs Council for 2025/2026.
What we cover in this episode:
- The layer you never see: Dr Petersen explains that student success is built in layers, each catching something different. One is about you as a person and what is happening outside the lecture hall. One is about your path through the degree. And one, which students experience every day without noticing, is the teaching itself: how a module is designed, how an assessment is built, whether lecturers are trained to teach and not only to know their subject. A well-designed assessment does not help a student who is drowning outside the classroom, which is why the layers cannot work in isolation.
- Assessment that measures learning, not memory: Dr Rock strips the jargon off "transformative assessment" and draws the line between a test that checks what you memorised and one that tells you whether you actually learned something.
- Feedback as data, not verdict: Most students read a mark as a judgement. Dr Rock makes the case for reading feedback as information about your own learning, and explains why reflective practice, thinking about how you think, is what makes learning stick.
- Why teaching someone else changes what you know: Dr Ntwasa coordinates peer-to-peer facilitation training and unpacks what shifts in your own understanding the moment you have to explain something to a peer. He also addresses the most persistent misconception about what peer facilitators are actually there to do.
- Extended Curriculum Programmes: The standard three-year pathway does not work for everyone. Dr Ntwasa discusses whether the value of that extra time is really about pace, or about something deeper in how learning needs to happen.
- PREDAC, SoTL, and the training your lecturers get: Ms Swart-Jansen van Vuuren explains what the Professional Educational Development for Academics course and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning actually involve, what separates a good lecturer from one whose students genuinely succeed, and the one thing lecturers learn about how students learn that would change how you prepare for a test.
- Why first year decides so much: The case for why the first year determines whether a student ever properly learns how to learn, rather than only how to cope, and what teaching support looks like in a high-stakes faculty like Law.
- The student view from the Academic Affairs Council: Jordan Dart on the most common student complaint that traces back to a misunderstanding of how assessment works rather than real unfairness, the study habits he has to un-teach in his workshops, and the moment in his own degree when he realised he had been studying hard without actually learning.
Where to find support:
Visit www.sun.ac.za, click "Students", then "Support", then "Student Success".
Email studysuccess@sun.ac.za and the CSCD will contact you within 24 hours to connect you with the right support.
Stream MFM 92.6: www.mfm.co.za
Follow us on socials: @mfm926
