Eco 101

ECO 101

Note: William Bromer is the editor of Ecology 101. Anyone wishing to contribute
articles or reviews to this section should contact him at the Department of Natural Sciences,
University of St. Francis, 500 N. Wilcox, Joliet, IL 60435, (815) 740-3467, e-mail:
wbromer@stfrancis.edu.

If You Cant Beat Em, Join Em: Using Facebook to Reach Students About
the Relevance of Ecology
James B. McGraw, West Virginia University, E-mail: jmcgraw@wvu.edu
It is the first day of Introductory Ecology. Professor X walks in and scans the faces of the 100plus fidgeting undergraduate students. The course is required, because Xs fellow biologists recognize
the importance of ecology to a well-educated biology major. But most of the students see a future
curing sick patients, filling cavities, dispensing antibiotics, or in some other fashion being involved with
health-related careers. Their lack of patience with having to take an ecology course is not due to lack of
intellectual curiosity. Rather, they belong to a generation of students that needs to know up front why they
are studying a subject if they are to care about it. After all, information is now easily accessible on the
web in quantities unfathomable only a few years ago. Even the best students have to make discriminating
choices about what to engage their brains in deciphering, and what to ignore. No matter how beautifully
Professor X explains the theory of exponential population growth or the effect of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere, and no matter how obvious it is (to X) that these subjects are centrally relevant to the human
condition, most students in a traditional ecology course just dont get it.
The other observation Professor X makes upon entering that classroom on day one is that the students
are very often, in fact, engaged. In the past, there would have been a scattering of raised newspapers in
the crowd. However, now, many of them can be found staring intently at their smart phones, tapping
away at the face of their ever present electronic companions with mindboggling speed. Some of these
students are texting. Many are checking, and contributing to, their version of the news, the news that is

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relevant to them: Facebook (or MySpace or some other social media). Professor X is dismayed upon
scanning the audience, after making a particularly brilliant ecological point, to find that some of these
students remain transfixed by their i-devices 20 minutes into the lecture.
To engage undergraduate students in ecology, why not insinuate ourselves, and our subject, into their
newsfeed by using the open network of social media? With this question in mind, in Spring semester
2011 I started a Facebook Group for Biology 221 (Ecology and Evolution, mostly an ecology course)
at West Virginia University. I wanted to know if students would engage at a deeper and broader level
with the subject of ecology, and practically speaking, would they actually care more and learn more as
a result? Could I divert their attention from their friends to my subject, just for a little while, now and
then? While I used Facebook for this exercise because it is the dominant social medium used at present,
other social media are capable of creating similar interacting groups (e.g., MySpace, Google+).
The mechanics of creating a Facebook Group are relatively simple and can be gleaned from any
number of web sites, including Facebook itself (http://www.facebook.com/groups). In order to create a
Group, you must be a member of Facebook yourself, but you do not need to have any Friends; i.e., you
do not need to engage in the usual Facebook social interactions if you choose not to. When you create a
Facebook Group, you will set yourself up as the administrator of the group. To join, students will request
to be members, and you will permit them in. You will also set controls over who sees the messages
(i.e., posts) on the Group. As of this writing (but Facebook is changing all the time), there were three
possible settings: (1) Secret (only members can see the Group and what members post), (2) Closed
(everyone can see the Group, but only members see posts), or (3) Open (public; everyone can see the
Group and what members post). In the interest of maximizing benefits to students, whether they joined
the group or not, I chose option 3. When you, as administrator, permit students into the Group, they do
not become your personal Friends on Facebook. For me, this was important, as I have made it a personal
policy not to friend undergraduate students on Facebook; I do not want them having access to vacation
pictures or political posts that I share with my small group of personal Facebook Friends. Nor do I want
to see their beer pong exploits of the previous weekend or their spring break pictures from Miami Beach.
Course supplement, not requirement
Some students, and even more adults, have significant privacy concerns with social media. Respecting
this, I did not require students to join the Biology 221 Facebook Group. Rather, it was optional for
them to join. This meant that, in fairness, I felt I could not share vital course material on Facebook
that nonjoiners did not also have free access to. I defined vital course material as material essential
for answering test or quiz questions such that their grade would be materially affected by their lack of
participation. At the same time, I felt that participation in the Facebook Group should enhance learning
by providing students opportunities to think more deeply about ecological topics. The benefit of joining
the Group was therefore not so different from the benefit accrued by those who came to office hours, or
those who chose to ask me questions in class or via E-mail about the course material. There is a strong
temptation to communicate important information about course mechanics (test reminders, extra-credit
opportunities, and so forth) via Facebook because it is easy to do from your desktop computer. However,
if I did this, typically in response to queries, I also presented the information in class or on the class web
site.

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Participation
Our course is a 15-week course co-taught by two professors. In the first half, my colleague did not
use Facebook. When I began teaching halfway through the course, I immediately implemented the
Facebook Group. By the end of the semester, 119 out of 189 students in the class (63%) had become
members of the Biology 221 Facebook Group. There was a rapid increase in membership in the first
two weeks of my instruction period, but members continued to join until the last week of class. Of the
119 members, 40% were lurkers who never posted a like or a comment throughout the semester.
Of the other 71 students who contributed actively, 50 posted comments or links (the others posted only
likes to posts). Twenty-three students were considered very active participants, since they contributed
comments three or more times during the semester.
Instructor posts and responses
Natalie Portman welcomes you to Bio. 221 group site. OK, its shameless, but she actually was
an up-and-coming scientist before she got sidetracked in Hollywood. Dont believe me? Follow the
link ...
This was one of my first posts to the Facebook Group. I included a link to a New York Times article
describing the Oscar-winning actresss early exploits as a budding scientist. I then made the Facebook
Group more enticing by posting her image as the avatar for the Group. Although this may indeed
have been a shameless ploy to attract members to the Group, the post set the tone as one in which I,
the instructor, would be interacting in a casual, friendly, and sometimes humorous way to engage the
students with the Group. Four people liked the post (only about a dozen students were members at that
point in the semester).
Most of my posts early in the semester were links to news articles related in some way to class
material. I could have mentioned the articles in lecture; however, I was hoping to entice at least a few
students to read a portion or all of the article. Also, some of the articles were only indirectly related to
class material, so they would have been a distraction from the lecture. For example, another post reads
I mentioned in class Friday how aerial imagery can be used to do direct counts of certain
species (such as Hawaiian silverswords). We may make a few more aerial tours before the semester
is over. All kinds of things can be seen from satellites; unfortunately some of them rather gruesome,
as in those described in this link from an excellent blog by Andy Revkin called DotEarth.
This was followed by a link to Revkins blog showing how satellite imagery was documenting
violence in Sudan.
Biology 221 routinely encourages students to attend relevant lectures on campus by giving small,
extra-credit points for attendance. I used the Facebook site to give students a little more information
prior to one such lecture by Bert Drake on his long-term CO2 experiments, to help them decide whether
to go and to give them some background.

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Here are some details about Dr. Drakes research, if you want to know a little more before deciding
whether to go to the ECO Monday, 4 PM, G21 Ming Hsieh Hall
The talk was well attended by students in the class. After the lecture, I posed a simple question
on Facebook: What did you think of Drakes lecture? The question drew three similar affirmative
comments about the lecture. Here is one:
Yeah the guy is brilliant. It was great that his fieldwork was at the cutting edge, yet he was able to get
the point across to both those with advanced understanding and those with little-to-no understanding
of the science itself.
I also provided links to introduce other prominent ecologists to the students. For example, when I
introduced matrix population biology in lecture that same day, I posted a link to Hal Caswells web page,
giving my personal take on his stature in the field.
I found that a particularly powerful lecture supplement for Facebook was providing links to videos,
primarily on YouTube, to illustrate certain principles visually in a way that was impractical in class.
For example, a number of videos show mouse traps loaded with ping pong balls to illustrate explosive
growth of the flying ball population (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxzPN-vdP_0). Sometimes
others have posted lectures presenting a topic in an alternative manner to the approach I used in class,
thus giving students an additional angle for learning a concept.
One technique I found effective was to pose a question for students to ponder, then sit back and see
if a discussion followed.
Do you think human population growth is density-dependent? Does our reproductive success
change at high (cities?) vs. low (rural?) population sizes? How about survival???
While in Montana on spring break, I posted the following:
Coming up well be discussing two-species interactions in class. This morning I saw a magpie
(a western crowlike bird with a long tail) land on the rump of a cow moose! I wonder what that
interaction was??? Has anyone else seen puzzling two-species interactions over break?
This query generated six wide-ranging comments from students while on their spring breaks. Some
questions were curve balls:
Two guys are in a bar on High St. late one Friday night; they are both interested in the same girl.
They get annoyed with each other until finally a nasty fight breaks out. Interference competition or
exploitation competition?
The answer, of course, was neither, since those terms refer to interspecific competition, not
intraspecific. But the post generated eight posts in quick order. Sometimes the news provided a light

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moment to stimulate thought.
What do the small ground finch, medium ground finch, and Charlie Sheen have in common? You
may know the answer after todays lecture... ;)
Numerous guesses followed in short order until one clever student got the correct answer: character
displacement. Students seemed to enjoy groaning aloud over bad puns.
In an attempt to stimulate interest in biodiversity, I started a miniseries of posts I called Creature
Features, complete with photographs. The species were selected by majority vote of student participants
in extra-credit bird walks. Typically they chose the splashiest bird species sighted that day. Green Heron,
Indigo Bunting, Wood Duck, Scarlet Tanager, and screech-owls were posted on separate occasions,
with commentary. In addition, I posted photos of invasive and native plants, with queries about their
identification and later an explanation of why I posted the images.
Students, particularly nearing test time, used Facebook to ask questions about course mechanics.
What time will the test be? How many questions are on the test? Do we have to know about subject X?
These queries presented a dilemma, since I did not provide vital information or even information that
would give an unfair advantage to Group members, relative to nongroup members. When I answered
those questions, I also provided the same information in lectures.
Interstudent teaching and learning
After 10 lectures (3.5 weeks), I gave my first class midterm exam. Several sample exam problem sets
(without answers) had been placed on the course web site weeks before. The evening before the exam,
one student posted a query for the group about a sample problem. Another student quickly answered
it. The first student thanked the person who answered. Following this initial exchange, a spontaneous
online help session began to percolate, with a large number of students participating as both teachers
and learners. The day before the evening exam, spontaneous study sessions arose using Facebooks chat
feature as students intensified their exam preparation. For the most part, I stayed out of these exchanges,
as long as the explanations and answers were correct (they mostly were). Upon reflection, it should have
occurred to me that Facebook would be used for Wiki-study, but I was both surprised and delighted at
the time. I had no idea how many lurkers there were observing these exchanges and learning from them,
but since the posts were going to every members Facebook newsfeed, I suspected many students were
paying attention.
Facebook membership and student performance
Since students self-selected in joining the Biology 221 Facebook Group, comparisons between the
populations of nonusers and Facebook users may include an inherent bias. Fortunately, the fact that the
first half of the course was taught by an instructor who did not implement the Facebook Group provided
some measure of control. In addition, I compared exam performance on my midterm with the scores on
my midterms covering the same material from several prior years (prior to the Facebook Group).

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I first asked whether Facebook Group joiners represented higher-performing students in the class
by comparing mean scores on the first two class midterms (given by the earlier instructor) between the
two groups. There was no significant test score difference between joiners and nonjoiners (F = 0.9689,
P = 0.3262). Next, I asked whether joiners improved their scores to a greater degree between midterms
1 and 2 (no Facebook Group) and midterm 3 (when the Facebook opportunity was available). Again
there was no significant difference in improvement between joiners and nonjoiners (F = 0.3527, P =
0.5533). The difficulty in making a simple interpretation of the latter analysis was that the Facebook site
was public and open, so even students who did not join the Group could read the posts and potentially
benefit from the Facebook posts and interactions. Therefore, I asked two further questions. First, did the
students improve significantly from their scores on the prior two midterms? In fact, the mean test score
improved 6.6% relative to their previous two exams, a significant increase in performance (t = 7.1750, P
< 0.0001). This could simply mean that midterm 3 was easier than midterms 1 and 2; however, in prior
course offerings this had not been the case. To strengthen the conclusion, I also compared midterm 3 for
2011 with the scores on midterm 3 (covering the same material, all designed and administered by me)
in 20052010 (Fig. 1). While scores on this exam fluctuated over a range from 66.7% to 70.1% in the
six years prior to 2011, none of these differed from each other according to a Tukey-Kramer post hoc
test. The one mean that deviated significantly was from 2011, with a mean score of 76.65% (vs. a mean
of 68.71% for the previous six years). This represented an 11.6% increase. While it is certainly possible
that the exam was easier than in previous years, this seems unlikely, primarily because I personally
designed all of the exams and, in my opinion, they covered the same material with the same depth as in
previous years.

Fig. 1. Performance on midterm 3 in Biology 221 for 20052011. For the first six years, Facebook
was not used as a supplement to class material.

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Facebook evaluation from the student perspective
At the end of the semester, I handed out a supplement to the standard university-administered student
evaluation of instruction designed to address the specific implementation of Facebook in Biology 221.
These were anonymous, and students were instructed to give their honest reactions so we could gauge
the efficacy of the Group. Of the respondents, 74.4% were Facebook Group users. Those who had not
signed up were asked why they did not join. Eleven of these students said they did not use Facebook at
all. Two did not want instructors to see their profile information, and one was concerned about things
posted on their wall (not visible to instructors anyway). Nine students just did not get around to joining,
and two others could not find the group.
Eighty-two percent of Facebook Group users followed at least one link to an article or web site posted
by the instructor. Ninety percent responded that Facebook added something of value to the course. The
specific ways in which the Group added value varied considerably among students. Students were able
to choose multiple possible answers from a list, as well as add their own observations to the list. Fig. 2
illustrates the percentage of students who perceived benefits in each of several ways.

Fig. 2. Ways in which Facebook users found the Group to be personally helpful. Students were
allowed to choose as many responses as they liked.
My original purpose for the Facebook Group (helping students understand the relevance of ecological
principles in the real world) ranked third among the selected responses (Fig. 2). Course mechanics, the
utility of Facebook I valued least (because I provided that information in lecture or on the web site), was
the response most often selected by students. Second in rank was the value of the group as a study tool,
which I had not anticipated. About half of the students felt they got to know me better as a result of my

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interactions with them on the Group. The other benefits to students were chosen by fewer than half of
the respondents, but taken together, they still represented a significant list of contributions.

A full 80% of respondents felt the group helped them learn more Ecology and Evolution material.
Almost half (44%) felt they would get a better grade as a result. Asked whether the Facebook Group was
a good idea for the course, 94.5% responded, yes.
Benefits to the professor
For a busy professor (and who isnt?), adding to a large course another feature that requires tending,
such as a Facebook Group, can fall into the category of just one more burden on an already overtaxed
faculty member if there are not clear, tangible rewards. I would summarize the rewards from my
perspective as threefold. First, as a professor, my goal, first and foremost, is to facilitate and encourage
student interest and learning. Written evaluation comments such as, Some of the article links and photo
links were very interesting and Became more interested in the material, convinced me that some
students indeed responded with increased interest. Even better were public posts to the Facebook Group
such as thanks for this awesome class dr. mcgraw!!! =) and
I really learned a lot during this course, and it has even opened my eyes to possibly pursuing a
career in ecology. Thanks for a great semester! BTW, this facebook group was extremely helpful and
made it very easy to discuss topics with each other. Keep it going!
The higher mean score on midterm exam 3 relative to previous exams (either earlier in the semester or
in earlier years), while not definitive proof, suggested that students learned more as a result of Facebook.
Second, the distance between instructor and student, which is so difficult to overcome in a large
classroom, was significantly reduced by my interactions within the Facebook Group. Profile pictures
helped me to place names with faces, a talent at which I am not naturally gifted. This was aided on
occasion by other profile information students shared publicly, such as their hometown, favorite bands
or TV shows, and so forth. The social barriers so typical of studentprofessor interactions were not
absent on Facebook, but were much reduced by the more casual atmosphere of the posts and the frequent
use of humor. Simply by adopting commonly used Facebook shorthand (e.g., Thx for Thanks, U
for You), I believe students felt more at ease and willing to share ideas. I especially enjoyed that
certain students started feeling secure enough to crack jokes and post their own links to ideas we had
talked about in class.
Third, scores on standardized instructor evaluations increased relative to prior years. I submit that
evaluations of ecologists who teach large courses, particularly those that are required of all majors,
routinely suffer from the perception by students that the course material is not directly relevant to
their career paths. I believe Facebook helped students better understand the importance of ecology and
improved their perception of my teaching effectiveness. As just one example, students were asked to score
a summary statement: The instructors teaching effectiveness was (1) poor, (2) fair, (3) satisfactory, (4)
good, (5) excellent. My mean score on this statement for 20052010 for the same course was 4.24. In
the Facebook semester of Spring 2011, my score was 4.49, the highest of all seven years. The summary

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scores on this and two other questions asked in the evaluation of every course in our department are
used, in part, to rate our teaching, and hence to determine merit pay.
Summary
Over the past decade, Facebook has become the dominant electronic social medium. As such, students
are connected as never before. Their newsfeed has relevance to them, and they pay attention to it.
Insertion of news items from a class group is a natural extension of this Facebook function and a way
to ensure that academic topics stay on a students radar screen outside of the classroom. The potential
of Facebook to facilitate group interactions, such as studying for tests or having conversations about
controversial or challenging subjects, further adds to its value. Facebook may facilitate learning by
providing an opportunity for spaced repetition of concepts (Karpicke and Bauernschmidt 2011). If
the instructor presents a concept in class, then later reinforces it on Facebook with a question about that
concept or a link to an article that illustrates that concept, the idea is reinforced and more likely to be
learned. Facebook study sessions, by their very nature, have the advantage of the educational concept
known as interleaving (Richland et al. 2005), whereby students pose different classes of problems in
succession. Often students study a single topic or class of problems at one time (e.g., a set of sample
exponential growth problems), but in online study sessions, the sequence of problems posed by students
appeared quasi-random, such that those involved were required to shift mental gears to address the
problem in front of them. This interleaving of testing has been shown to improve retention.
Perhaps it is just wishful thinking, but I suggest that the greatest value of Facebook is to expose
students to the numerous ways in which ecological principles affect our everyday lives. I make it my
mission in Biology 221 to ensure that students understand that humans, as unique as they may be, are
still an animal population existing in a finite habitat, consuming resources, subject to natural selection,
and profoundly altering and altered by their environment. If I can drive home just that one lesson, by
inserting ecology into their daily Facebook newsfeed, I believe the effort will be worth it.
Literature cited
Karpicke, J. D., and A. Bauernschmidt. 2011 Spaced retrieval: absolute spacing enhances learning
regardless of relative spacing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
37:12501257. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0023436
Richland, L. E., R. A. Bjork, J. R. Finley, and M.C. Linn. 2005. Linking cognitive science to education:
generation and interleaving effects. In B. G. Bara, L. Barsalou, and M. Bucciarelli, editors. Proceedings
of the Twenty-Seventh Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Mahwah, New Jersey,
USA.

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