Pre-service teachers' understanding of measures of centre: When the meaning gets lost?

Measures of centre (the mean, median and mode) are fundamental to the discipline of statistics. Yet previous research shows that students may not have a thorough conceptual understanding of these measures, even though these statistics are easy to calculate. This study describes the findings of a study of pre-service teachers's ideas of measures of centre. The results indicate that while some participants had ideas about these statistics that were valid; a substantial proportion displayed little understanding of these measures.