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The Teaching Quantitative Skills in the Geosciences website has not been significantly updated since 2011. We are preserving the web pages here because they still contain useful ideas and content. But be aware that the site may have out of date information.
You can find more recent and extensive resources on the Teach the Earth website.

Mean and Standard Deviation Calculations

Initial Publication Date: December 21, 2006

Most basic statistics texts provide definitions and formula for calculating the mean and standard deviation of a simple univariate data set. The Online HyperStat text (more info) is one such readily available resource. In particular, the HyperStat resource Describing Univariate Data ( This site may be offline. ) provides this information as well as other relevant definitions.


DISCUS (Discovering Important Statistical Concepts Using SpreadSheets) provides a beautiful MS Excel Workbook with an MS Word "Work Card" as an interactive student activity to learn about descriptive statistics in the spread sheet environment. The related link DISCUS (more info) has additional resources that could also be useful to you or your students.


JAVA applets at Duke University is a great resource for online statistical calculators and interactive examples.

This Excellent online data analysis program was used to create the histogram and table of relate statistics for the annual mean temperature in Vancouver, Wa between 1895 and 1994 shown below. The Text File of 1895 to 1994 annual average Temperature for Vancouver, WA ( 1kB Jul8 04) was used to paste data into the window displayed after clicking the "Type in Data" button. Click either image below to enlarge.

Table generated with Online Statistical Software