You've found the average of a group of numbers before. Another word for average is mean. In this lesson we will discuss the mean, median, and mode. We will start off with an example:
DATA SET: 2, 3, 5, 5, 7, 9, 11.
MODE: 5 MEDIAN: 5 TOTAL: 42 MEAN: 6
To find the mean you find the total sum of the value points and you divide that total sum by the number of data points. In this example the total sum of the data points was 42 and there were 7 data points and so we divided 42 by 7 and got 6 as the mean.
The mode is simply the most frequently occurring data point value. In this set there were two fives and one of each of the other data points. Therefore, five was the most frequently occurring data point value and so five is the mode.
The median is the data point which is exactly in the middle. Luckily the data points shown above are already in order and so it is easy to find the middle value. In a group of seven data points the middle value will be the fourth value. As you can see, there is a 5 in this position.
Here's another example:
DATA POINTS: 2, 4, 6, 6, 7, 7, 7, 7, 8.
MODE: 7 (most frequently occurring value) MEDIAN: 7 (middle value) TOTAL: 54 (sum of data points) MEAN: 6 (average)