IB DP Physics skill pack on proportionality and scaling: SL and HL, first assessment 2025. Six worked examples, five figures and 30 answered questions.
The IB guide asks students to practise this technique inside the topics that need it. So this pack is not a unit of the course. Use it as reference and catch-up material beside that teaching, not instead of it. Reach for it when your class can use an equation but still cannot say what trebling the radius does to the force.
This pack is worked, not taught. The 220 minutes it takes is student working time, not teaching time. Split it into three sittings of about 75, 70 and 75 minutes. A note on the page marks the end of each sitting.
Where it stops: your students read the constant straight off a gradient, without the best-fit line or the uncertainty a Paper 1B analysis needs.
What students learn:
- Stating a proportionality, and whether it is positive, negative or neither
- Scaling by the ratio method, as a factor or a percentage, and backwards
- Rearranging before reading the power, and scaling two changes at once
- The shape each relationship draws, and how to sketch it
- Choosing what to plot to straighten a curve, and what the gradient means
Practice A: five fluency items, four of them drill tables, with 28 rows and 67 answers. Practice B: twelve applied items, 32 lettered parts. Practice C: four multiple-choice items, every option explained, and three structured questions worth 34 marks.
IB skills (Tool 3: Mathematics). Taught: direct and inverse proportionality, with positive and negative relationships; the effect of a change in one variable on another; sketching graphs with labelled but unscaled axes. Practised: selecting and manipulating equations; ratios, reciprocals and exponents; arithmetic and algebra; linearizing graphs where appropriate; interpreting graph features.
What’s included:
- Student Worksheet, 30 pages, colour and B&W, answers removed
- Teacher Key, 44 pages, colour and B&W, with every answer, 21 worked solutions and teaching notes
- The editable worksheet, a self-contained HTML file
One source file makes both the worksheet and the key, so they always agree. The pack is tied to no syllabus topic or understanding. Its technique belongs to the IB skills in the study of physics. Use it with grades 11-12 (ages 16-19) as homework, reference or revision.
Part of the IB DP Physics IA and Paper 1B Skills Bundle, 30% off buying the packs separately.
Related resources:
- Graphical Analysis of Motion, where a gradient is read inside a topic
- Measuring the Acceleration of Free Fall, the practical that straightens a curve (free)
- SUVAT Equations II, where the free-fall relationship it scales is taught
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