A ‘bottom-up’ approach to food web construction

Abstract

The ability to comprehend trophic (nutritional) relationships and food web dynamics is an essential part of environmental literacy. However, students face severe difficulties in grasping the variety of causal patterns in food webs. We propose a curriculum for comprehending trophic relations in elementary school. The curriculum allows students to construct a food web using real data and following guidelines for the identification of organisms and their food preferences. The curriculum was applied to 22 fourth graders of an elementary school in Nicosia, Cyprus. Another 24 fourth graders participated as control group. Children of the experimental group managed to construct quite precise and complicate webs, including a large number of species and drawing multiple trophic connections between them. However, difficulties in grasping aspects of the functional and behavioural characteristics of food webs remained after the learning intervention. We conclude that the proposed curriculum could serve as an introductory basis for studying food webs, but it should be accompanied with a series of activities for more explicit consideration of the function and behaviour of food webs in order to offer a compete educational account for comprehending trophic relations.