MEASURES OF

CENTRAL
TENDENCY
AND
DISPERSION/
VARIABILITY
It is a single value that attempts to describe a
set of data (like scores) by identifying the
central position within that set of data or
scores.
Sometimes called “measures of central
location”.
Refers to the center of a distribution of
observations.
3 MEASURES CENTRAL TENDENCY
1. MEAN - (often called the average) mean is equal to
the sum of all the values in the data set divided by the
number of vales in the data set.

2. MEDIAN - is the middle score for a set of scores

arranged from lowest to highest. the mean is less affected
by extremely low and extremely high scoes.

3. MODE - the most frequentscore in our data set.

MEASURES OF CENTRAL TENDENCY

The mean, mode and median are

valid measures of central
tendency but under different
conditios, one measure becomes
more appropriate than the others.
WHEN NOT TO USE THE MEAN
It is particularly susceptible to the
influence of outliers. these are
values that are unusual compared
to the rest of the data set by being
especially small or large in
numerical value
 NORMAL AND
SKEWED
DISTRIBUTIONS
OUTCOME-BASED TEACHING-LEARNING
AND SCORE DISTRIBUTION
The principles of outcome-based teaching-learning, then
students’ scores in the assessment phase of the lesson will
tend to congregate on the higher end of the score
distribution. Score distribution will be positively skewed.
If what teachers teach and assess are not aligned with the
intended learning outcomes, the opposite will be true.
Score distribution will be negatively skewed which means
that scores tend to congregate on the lower end of the
score distribution.
MEASURES OF DISPERSION
OR VARIABILITY
The measures of variability
indicate how spread out a group
of scores is or how varied the
scores are. Common measures of
dispersion or variability are
range, variance, and standard
deviation.
RANGE
What is variability?
Variability refers to how “spread out” a
group of scores is. The terms variability,
spread and dispersion are synonyms,
and refer to how spread out a
distribution is.

Range - This is the simplest measure of

variability. The range is simply the
highest score minus the lowest score.
 VARIANCE
Can be defined in terms of how close the scores
in the distribution are to the middle of the
distribution. Using the mean as the measure of
the middle of the distribution, the variance is
defined as the average squared difference of the
scores from the mean.
One thing that is important to
notice is that the mean deviation
from the mean is 0. This will always
be the case. The mean of the
squared deviation is 1.5. Therefore,
the variance is 1.5.
 STANDARD DEVIATION
The symbols also change to reflect that we are
working on a sample instead of the whole
population.
The mean is now X (for sample mean)
And the answer is s (for Sample Standard
Deviation)
But that does not affect the calculations.
Only N-1 instead of N changes the calculation.
STANDARD DEVIATION
It is simply the square root of the variance.
It is especially useful measure of variability
when the distribution is normal or
approximately normal because the
proportion of the distribution within the
given number of standard deviation from
the mean can be calculated.
STEPS IN CALCULATING THE SAMPLE
STANDARD DEVIATION
Step 1. Work out the mean

Step 2. Then for each number; subtract the Mean and

square the result

Step 3. Work out the mean of those squared differences.

Step 4. Take the square root of that

Standard deviation is a measure
of dispersion, the more
dispersed the data, the less
consistent the data are. A lower
standard deviation means that
the data are more clustered
around the mean and hence the
data set is more consistent.
 INTERPRETATION OF
STANDARD DEVIATION
Let us use the standard deviation
to compare two data sets and to
interpret how consistent the data
are. The lower the standard
deviation, the more consistent the
data are.
Example- Two bowlers, Katie and Mike have the scores
given below:
Katie’s Scores 189 146 200 241 231
Mike’s Scores 235 201 217 168 186
Both sets of data have a mean (x) = 201.4

Katie has a standard deviation of SD= 37.6470

Mike has a standard deviation of SD= 26.1017
Since Mike has a smaller standard deviation, he is a more
consistent bowler than Katie.
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LISTENING!
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