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
ELI5: It’s literally just tells you how “spread out” the data is.
Low SD = most children are close to the mean age
High SD = most children’s age is away from the mean age
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ELI10: it’s useful to know how spread out your data is.
The simple way of doing this is to ask “on average, how far away is each datapoint from the mean?” This gives you MAD ([Mean Absolute Deviation](https://www.khanacademy.org/math/statistics-probability/summarizing-quantitative-data/other-measures-of-spread/a/mean-absolute-deviation-mad-review))
“Standard deviation” and “Variance” are more sophisticated versions of this with some advantages.
Edit: I would list those advantages but there are too many to fit in this textbox.
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