Central Tendency

Central tendency is a statistical measure; a single score to define the center of a distribution. It is also used to find the single score that is most typical or best represents the entire group. No single measure is always best for both purposes. There are three main types:

• Mean: sum of all scores divided by the number of scores in the data, also referred to as the average.
• Median: the midpoint of the scores in a distribution when they are listen in order from smallest to largest. It divides the scores into two groups of equal size. With an even number of scores, you compute the average of the two middle scores.
• Mode: the most frequently occurring number(s) in a data set.

Here are a variety of videos to help you understand the concepts of these measures, finding the median using a histogram, and finding a missing value given the mean. Continue reading →