Let’s go back to our original distribution. How would you describe or pick the most typical value from this data set? What value seems to best represent this distribution?

One might think of using an average of the scores, the middle score, or maybe the score that was recorded most often, to describe the distribution. These methods describe various measures of central tendency of the distribution. Each central tendency measure helps us estimate the center of the distribution, but in different ways.

We use three measures of central tendency: the mode, the median, and the mean. We will look at each in turn.