A change in the size of a prey population has no effect on its predator population. If the size of one population in a food web is altered, all other populations in the web will be altered in the same way. This study displays how students know that relationships in food chains and food webs exist, but they do not know to what extent these relationships are connected. Students build their own concepts based on television, movies, parental instruction, and prior classes. Textbooks will attempt to water down a complex issue so that the reader can understand it, and by doing so they cause students to learn inaccurate facts and build false understandings.
Students tend to group animals by size and actions.
This type of classification scheme is based on prior knowledge that the students have gained outside of the classroom. Some misconceptions about the construction food chains were also found in Gallegos research. In addition, some students believe that members of a food chain are only grouped together in predator-prey pairs, and most students have yet to grasp the concept of a producer and its place in the food chain. Organisms higher in a food web feed on some organisms lower in the food web. Available energy decreases as one progresses up a food web.