A student has gotten the following grades on his tests: 87, 95, 76, and 88.Since you're probably more familiar with the concept of 'average' than with 'measure of central tendency', I used the more comfortable term.)

The technical definition of what we commonly refer to as the 'average' is technically called 'the arithmetic mean': adding up the values and then dividing by the number of values. (In the above, I've used the term 'average' rather casually. How can I keep straight which average is which?Ībout the only hard part of finding the mean, median, and mode is keeping straight which 'average' is which. So if you're not certain how you should answer the 'mode' part of the above example, ask your instructor before the next test. I've seen books that go either way on this there doesn't seem to be a consensus on the 'right' definition of 'mode' in the above case. Note: Depending on your text or your instructor, the above data set may be viewed as having no mode rather than having two modes, because no single solitary number was repeated more often than any other. Find the mean, median, mode, and range for the following list of values:.It expresses 'spread', being how far the values are distributed (or how concentrated they are). The 'range' of a list a numbers is just the difference between the largest and smallest values. If no number in the list is repeated, then there is no mode for the list. The 'mode' is the value that occurs most often.To find the median, your numbers have to be listed in numerical order from smallest to largest, so you may have to rewrite your list before you can find the median. The 'median' is the 'middle' value in the list of numbers.The 'mean' is the 'average' you're used to, where you add up all the numbers and then divide by the number of numbers.This is why the average income is typically expressed by a different sort of average. But this does not accurately reflect what we mean when we're trying to discuss the 'average' income.

The numerical average can mislead by suggesting that the average (in this case, we mean 'typical') person earns a few tens of thousands per year. A typical example would be the case where nearly every person in a given population lives on about two dollars a day, but there is a small elite with incomes in the millions.

Mean median mode range khan academy