At the first meeting he asked his students,“How much do you all like to read?”

“A lot!” they all said together. He was happy to hear this answer, but it did not help him solve his problem. He decided to take a survey about how many books each student read last week. When tallying the results, he found that some students had read more books in a week than others.

“What I really want is the average,” Mr. Moreno decided.

The average value for any set of numbers, such as the average number of books read by fifth-grade students in a year, can be found in more than one way. In this lesson you will learn about comparing two of these kinds of averages: median and mode. You can find both the mode and the median of a set of numbers easily and use either to describe the data you collect and to answer questions. Later this year, you will learn to find a third kind of average: the mean.

The mode is the number in the data set that appears most often. The median is the number that is exactly in the middle of a set of data.