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Knowledge and Skills Statement

Force, motion, and energy. The student describes the cause-and-effect relationship between force and motion.

The further explanation is designed to be a resource for educators that helps them better understand the topic their students are learning. Further explanations may be written at a more complex level than would be expected for students at the grade level.

In grade 7, students grapple with the conceptual relationships among speed, velocity, distance, displacement, and direction.  They use this understanding to analyze and interpret linear motion with distance-time graphs. In high school IPC and Physics, students will expand on this understanding mathematically and by modeling velocity and acceleration graphically. 

Glossary terms and definitions are consistent across kindergarten through high school in the TEKS Guide. The definitions are intended to give educators a common understanding of the terms regardless of what grade level they teach. Glossary definitions are not intended for use with students.

a vector quantity (magnitude and direction) that describes the net change in position of an object; the difference between the final and initial positions of an object, regardless of the actual path covered to reach the final position; measured in a straight line

a numerical measurement of how far apart objects or points are; the degree or amount of separation between two points, lines, surfaces, or objects; a measure of the length of the path that an object takes without regard for the starting or ending place or the direction of its travel

a push or pull between two objects

motion of an object in only one direction

an act, process, or instance of changing position or location

 a scalar quantity (number, magnitude) that is a measurement of the rate of change in the motion of an object, calculated when the distance traveled is divided by the time taken

a vector quantity (magnitude and direction) that is the directional speed of an object in motion; indicates the rate of change in position of the object measured from a particular frame of reference in a particular standard of time

Research

Shen, Ji. “Walking out Graphs.” Science Scope 33, no. 4 (December 2009): 47–51. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43182723

Summary: "Walking Out Graphs" provides an explanation of displacement, position, and velocity. Students use the distance of the classroom and simple time measurements to collect linear motion data.  The data is then used to build a graph to discuss the variations between speed and velocity.