Measures of variability describe how spread out numbers in a data set are. The standard deviation quantifies this spread and is calculated by taking the square root of the variance. The variance measures how far data values are from their average value. Calculating the standard deviation involves finding the mean, deviations from the mean, squaring the deviations, summing them, and taking the square root. Standardizing scores into z-scores allows comparisons across data sets by giving each score in relation to the mean and standard deviation of its data set.