Standard deviation

You use the standard deviation to find out how much the data that you have attained during your experiment differs from the average of that data.

Step 1: First to begin you calculate the mean or average of your x column (which is the column that you are trying to find the standard deviation for).

Step 2: Then you subtract the mean that you just got from the numbers you averaged to attain the mean.

Step 3: After doing that, you find the absolute value of all of those numbers, which will make them all positive.

Step 4: Square all of these numbers and put them in a column.

Step 5: Then find the mean (average) of the squared numbers.

Step 6: After doing all of that you need to take the square root of the number you just found. The number you get will be your standard of deviation

data collection	x-column		absolute value of x deviation
		*step 2 and 3	subtract the mean from the x column
	5		0.538461538	and find the absolute value
	2		2.461538462
	6		1.538461538
	4		0.461538462
	2		2.461538462
	8		3.538461538
	8		3.538461538
	2		2.461538462
	5		0.538461538
	7		2.538461538
	5		0.538461538
	3		1.461538462
*step 1	1		3.461538462
add them together =
*still step 1	58			x deviation^2
now divide by 13(your total number of x numbers)			*step 4	take the x deviations and
	58/13			0.2899408	square them
*step 1 complete	4.461538462	this is your mean		6.0591716
				2.3668639
				0.2130178
				6.0591716
				12.52071
				12.52071
				6.0591716
				0.2899408
				6.443787
				0.2899408
				2.1360947
				11.982249
			now find the mean of this column		*step 5
				67.230769
			now divide by 13(your total of numbers)		*step 5
				9.854802
			now find the square root of this number		*step 6
				4.6904158
			this number is you standard deviation