Please will someone explain what this is, (in simple terms)! :-)

I've been browsing on a Golden Retriever database website today, and on the details of some dogs it has 'mean progeny score'

In mathmaticals terms a 'mean' is another word for an average (Adding all the scores from the data together and dividing by the amount of data there)

Thanks, if it said average I'd have known what it meant! :-)
Long time since I left school.

It means, the most frequently occuring score.

Lol - Kay

The way I learnt it in school (complicated slightly by the fact that it was all in Swedish so somewhat uncertain about the terms) an AVERAGE is where you add all the figures together, divide it by the number of figures, and take the result. But a mean is the number in the middle of all numbers, so therefore more accurate. I.e. say you have 3 hip scores, one of 9, one of 20 and one of 100. The average of them would be 43 (9+20+100 divided by 3). But the MEAN would be 20. The fact that you have just one (in this simple example) really high number has increased the average in total, even though there are more low numbers than high.

But, you can also use the Median set of values rather than the Mean :-)

>It means, the most frequently occuring score.

The mode is the most frequently occurring score. The mean is the average of all scores. The median is the middle score of an ascending list.

Definitions here.

to calculate the Median

3, 13, 7, 5, 21, 23, 39, 23, 40, 23, 14, 12, 56, 23, 29

If we put those numbers in order we have:

3, 5, 7, 12, 13, 14, 21, 23, 23, 23, 23, 29, 39, 40, 56

There are fifteen numbers. Our middle number will be the eighth number:

3, 5, 7, 12, 13, 14, 21, 23, 23, 23, 23, 29, 39, 40, 56

The median value of this set of numbers is 23.

Ok, for example, one dogs mean progeny score was 13:2, that is very uneven isn't it?
If that is the mean score, does it also mean that all the scores were uneven, or maybe there was one score that was VERY bad on one side?

Mean : Average score when adding all data together and diving it by number of data.
Median : Middle score when data is put in chronological order
Mode: Most frequent occuring number

ETA:Sorry Jeangenie just realised i've written the same as you :-)  Really should read posts more!!

I'd like to see the Mode score given as well as the Mean. Averages are all very well, but the most common result would surely give a truer picture of a breed as a whole.

Thanks everyone, I think what they've done is put the highest, and the lowest scores as all the dogs I've looked at have the uneven numbers.

Actually your getting confused as they have given the actual average as it is a bit more than 13.

The BVA give the range, in my breed it is 0 - 61, so the lowest score we have had is 0 and the highest 61.

I think Cocopop's meaning the scores produced by individual dogs or bitches, not the breed average.

Goodness this is complicated -and see what I mean about having learnt it in Swedish so don't know the English equivalent words!

Yes that's it cocopop. :)