Measures of dispersion are statistical tools that help us understand how spread out or varied a set of data is. They provide insights into the range of values, showing how much individual data points differ from the average. Common measures include range, variance, and standard deviation, each offering a different perspective on data variability. For example, the range is the difference between the highest and lowest values in a dataset, while variance measures how far each number in the set is from the mean. Standard deviation is the square root of variance and indicates how much the data typically deviates from the average, making it easier to interpret.