Mean, Median, Mode, and Range!

Mean, Median, Mode and Range

Many times when studying mean, median, mode and range, students get confused, however if we can help them make connections with the meaning of the word or with a way to remember what it is asking, they are bound to be successful. The more repetition, the better.

Let's start with mean. Mean sounds much like the word mean when referring to the way the students may think of you for making them do this! Remind them that you are not mean, but sometimes the process may seem that way since it takes a while. Add all the numbers in the data set up and divide them by the number of numbers in the data set.
Example:

31, 24, 26, 33, 33, 29, 27

31+24+26+33+33+29+27=203        203/7=29      29 is the mean.

Moving on to median...Have students line the numbers up in order from least to greatest. Then the clue is to find the middle, which is similar to the word medium, which is often a middle size.
Example:

24,26,27,29,31,33,33       29 is the median. 

If however you have an even number of numbers, remind students to add the two middle numbers and divide by 2 to find the median.

Range is the difference between the largest and smallest values in the data set. Looking at the numbers in the data set, find the largest and smallest and subtract to find the difference. In this case it is: 33-24= 9
I like to remind students that a range is a big open area. So, the numbers stretch from smallest to largest.

Finally, finding mode is probably the easiest. Mode is the "moda" (fashion in Spanish) and the number that appears most often (number of highest frequency). Not every data set has a mode. In this case it does. The mode is 33 since it is repeated. If there is a 24, 24, 33, 33, 33. The mode would be 33 since it is repeated most often.

Here are a couple videos related to finding mean, median, and mode. Remember, make it fun!

source

source