"Real-life problems are messy. Sometimes there are multiple goals, and sometimes we'll return to this question several times, as our understanding of the goal will often change after we've worked on it for a while. A clearly articulated goal will provide direction to the thinking process and allow you to make better decisions about the skills you will need to use. In the course of thinking about real-world problems, you may need to change direction and redefine the problem and the desired outcome several times, but it's still important to have an outcome in mind to provide some focus. After all, if you don't know where you're going, you can never be sure if you've arrived," says Dr. Diane Halpern who will be in Beaumont on Thursday and Friday of this week. She will deliver two powerful sessions filled with the latest scholarship on critical thinking and cognitive learning. You still have time to register for either session. Welcome packets for students at Western Governors University now include a free Webcam, part of an extensive monitoring program used by the online university to make sure test-takers are who they say they are. At Western Governors, the average student is 36 years old, has a family, and takes a full course load on top of holding a full-time job. Because it’s convenient for them to be able to take tests from home, students have embraced the technology, says Janet W. Schnitz, associate provost for assessment and interim provost at the university. The university, which first started handing out cameras in July 2010, now has over 30,000 Web cams in use. Of American students at the top programs, Eric Schwitzgebel, a professor of philosophy at the University of California at Riverside, found that 29 percent came from just eight universities (the U.S. News & World Report top 10, minus the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), another 18 percent came from other universities in the magazine's top 25, and another 11 percent from elsewhere in the top 50. With another large group coming from leading liberal arts colleges, the analysis found that only 19 percent came from the 3,000-plus colleges and universities that don't sit on the top of anyone's rankings. Schwitzgebel's research focused on philosophy, but at least one other study has found a similar clustering in the students who enroll in graduate programs in history -- programs that are generally much larger than those in philosophy. Robert B. Townsend of the American Historical Association published a study in 2005 in which he found that about 100 generally elite undergraduate institutions produced the students who make up 55 percent of the graduate enrollments in Ph.D. programs. The history study found that the share of Ph.D. enrollment from those undergraduate institutions had been a bit lower during the 1980s, but increased again during the 1990s. As we move forward with our Quality Enhancement Plan, it is important to redesign our courses using active learning methods. The modification of traditional lectures is one way to incorporate active learning in the classroom. Research has demonstrated, for example, that if a faculty member allows students to consolidate their notes by pausing three times for two minutes each during a lecture, students will learn significantly more information (Ruhl, Hughes, and Schloss 1987). Two other simple yet effective ways to involve students during a lecture are to insert brief demonstrations or short, ungraded writing exercises followed by class discussion. Certain alternatives to the lecture format further increase student level of engagement: (1) the feedback lecture, which consists of two mini-lectures separated by a small-group study session built around a study guide, and (2) the guided lecture, in which students listen to a 20- to 30-minute presentation without taking notes, followed by their writing for five minutes what they remember and spending the remainder of the class period in small groups clarifying and elaborating the material.