Chances are you know your shoe size. But do you know the size of your ecological footprint?

The students in Adrienne Cooper’s Gen Ed course on the environment do.

“What I had them do was conduct their own little experiment to determine their ecological footprint,” said Cooper, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering. “They went through a number of exercises early in the semester to determine their environmental impact on the planet.”

Using Web sites such as rprogress.com and bestfootforward.com, the students filled out online questionnaires about their living, eating, buying, recycling and transportation habits; things that contribute to an individual’s ecological footprint.

The sites then calculate a person’s ecological footprint or how much of our natural resources one is consuming and how much they are putting back into the earth in the form of waste on a daily basis.

These calculations, Cooper said, give you an indication of how many planets it would take to support you if everyone else lived like you. “For the average American, that calculation is approximately 6 planets.”

Once the 39 students in the class had established their footprint, Cooper had them make a choice about their own lifestyle.

“They had to pick one thing that they did on a daily or routine basis that they could change over the course of a semester and measure it to see how that change might alter their ecological footprint,” she said.

A lot of her students chose to change their light bulbs from the common incandescent bulbs to the much more energy efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs.

Christopher Roman, a senior majoring in secondary education-biology, who chose the light bulb switch, said the experience was “eye-opening.”

“Doing something small like switching light bulbs can not only save a lot of power, but can save you money as well,” he said. “It took me five minutes to switch the light bulbs and I calculated that it is going to save me over $40 a year on my electric bill.”

Morgan Ashenfelter, a senior journalism major, said the exercise allowed her and her classmates the opportunity to see how changing a few small things in your daily life actually do make a difference.

“And it is things you don’t always think about,” she said.

Ashenfelter said she reduced her ecological footprint by conserving water during daily activities, namely turning off the water between scrubbing dirty dishes and rinsing them, and while shaving her legs in the shower.

“I don’t take really long showers, but while shaving my legs, I was wasting a lot of water just standing there,” she said. “I’m not really using the water to wash off at that point in time, so it is kind of selfish and wasteful.”

Cooper said that as a science core class, one of her objectives was to give the students the opportunity to see how an experiment is designed, how results are obtained and how those results are then analyzed.

“Some of the students were not able to see their success directly, especially those who chose to look at their consumption of meat, because if you consume meat or fish on a daily basis, you have a higher ecological footprint,” she said. “But one thing I can say that definitely was a success is that almost all of these students are now thinking about what they do and how it impacts the environment.”