someone please explain Standard Deviation to me.

Question

First of all, an example; mean age of the children in a test is 12.93, with a standard deviation of .76.

Now, maybe I am just over thinking this, but everything I Google gives me this big convoluted explanation of what standard deviation is without addressing the kiddy pool I’m standing in.

Edit: you guys have been fantastic! This has all helped tremendously, if I could hug you all I would.

In: Mathematics

Answer 1

If you flip the words around it makes a LOT more sense.

Deviation (from the) standard. It tells you how much your dataset has a variation from the “standard” of said dataset.

If you have 100 chickens, and 99 of them are yellow, and 1 is red, your “average” is “yellow”, and your standard deviation is very very low, because only one chicken “deviates” (from the) “standard”.