Take Time for Action: Mean and Median: Are They Really So Easy?

Abstract

When are median and mean taught to students in your curriculum? Our first introduction to these terms as students was in college-level statistics courses in the mathematics department. Of course, we had learned to find arithmetic averages during elementary school as an application of long division and again in high school algebra when learning to use variables to represent relationships in equations. One of the authors taught middle school in the 1970s, and the other taught finite mathematics to college students in the 1970s. We were surprised to find these measures of central tendency in the books for middle school and equally surprised that college students had not previously seen median and mode. The procedure for finding the median is much easier than the one for finding the mean, so why not include it in the middle school curriculum? To teach the mean, all we had to say to students was that it was the same as the average that they had already learned in fifthand sixth-grade mathematics.