In this paper, an improved Legendre collocation method is presented for a class of integro-differential equations which involves a population model. This improvement is made by using the residual function of the operator equation. The error differential equation, gained by residual function, has been solved by the Legendre collocation method (LCM). By summing the approximate solution of the error differential equation with the approximate solution of the problem, a better approximate solution is obtained. We give the illustrative examples to demonstrate the efficiency of the method. Also we compare our results with the results of the known some methods. In addition, an application of the population model is made.