These study tips are designed to clarify key points and help you to avoid errors that students commonly make. Review the Tips for Success as you study each chapter and review them again after you have studied each chapter.

1. The key challenge for this chapter is to understand the concept of what a distribution of means represents and why it is the appropriate comparison distribution when samples contain more than one individual.
• Up until now, you have encountered the mean as an effective way of summarizing the central tendency of a group of scores. In this chapter, you encounter the mean as a score in its own right: if you have lots of means, you then have a distribution of those means. It is therefore possible to examine the characteristics of that distribution with regard to its central tendency and spread by calculating the mean of the distribution of means and the standard deviation (and variance) of the distribution of means, respectively.
• Be sure to review the chapter as many times as necessary to ensure that you fully understood this concept before moving on to later chapters in the book (in which you will encounter more complex types of distributions of means)
2. Table 7-1 (p. 226) presents an excellent summary of the three types of distribution you have encountered so far in the text: a population’s distribution, a particular sample’s distribution, and a distribution of means.
• Review this table (especially the terminology and formulas) thoroughly before moving on to later chapters in the book.

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