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
The mean is the average of all the values.
The standard deviation is-in effect- a measure of the average distance of each value from the mean.
It takes the sum of the distances from each value to the mean squared, divides by the number of values, and takes a square root.
In basic terms, a small standard deviation means most of the values are close to the mean, while larger standard deviation means the values are more spread out away from the mean.
Almost all the other answers here are explaining SD in terms of normal distributions (“the bell curve”). No five year old needs to learn about normal distributions to understand SDs.
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