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

I’ll give my shot at it:

Let’s say you are 5 years old and your father is 30. The average between you two is 35/2 =17.5.

Now let’s say your two cousins are 17 and 18. The average between them is also 17.5.

As you can see, the average alone doesn’t tell you much about the actual numbers. Enter standard deviation. Your cousins have a 0.5 standard deviation while you and your father have 12.5.

The standard deviation tells you how close are the values to the average. The lower the standard deviation, the less spread around are the values.