Hey picturemeinthetrees,
I graduated from the QCE system in 2021 and I have tutored multiple students for specialist maths.
Your teacher wants you to essentially create the first model with Leslie matrices and then identify what assumptions you made. Because making many assumptions are not the best, they want you to create a new model by rectifying some of the assumptions you made for the first model. The second model (the "refined" model) should, theoretically, have better prediction values and also incorporate 1 or 2 or 3 of the assumptions that you would have made in the first model.
The second model could be anything but better to relate it to vectors or matrices so do some research online and some mathematical procedures should come up. You could use eigenvalues but just to help you, one of the more common methods is using Lefkovitch matrices - there should be research and sources on that to help you get your head around it. That should be sufficient for your second (or refined) model.
Hope that helps.
