Measures are calculations that are evaluated in real time. They’re most useful when you need to aggregate data or do up-to-the-minute calculations.

Measures are listed in the Fields list with a calculator icon and can be named anything you want. They can be dragged and dropped into a visualization just like any other field.

Definition

Measures are a generalization of the mathematical notions of length, area and volume. They are used to study probability theory and integration.

In music, measures are used to divide a long piece of music into smaller sections so it can be easier for professional musicians to read and perform. These segments are usually grouped together with bar lines to make it easier for people to listen to a piece of music and to play it on the instrument.

In addition to bars and measures, there are also time signatures that are used in musical compositions. In a 3/4 time signature, for example, the notes that are played within a single musical phrase will be grouped together as one unit.

Examples

Measures are a class of raw data numbers or values that can be used to track specific processes in business. They include values that represent a company’s sales, website visits, goods returned, and calls.

Depending on the context, measures can be either useful or useless, and can carry information that makes them orders of magnitude more important than their bare numbers. An example of a useful measure is the conversion rate for a marketing initiative.

The purpose of measurement can be in the service of quality, monitoring, making something fit (design, assembly), or solving problems. It may also be used to promote or assess a person’s performance.

Significance

Measures are a fundamental element in trade, science, and quantitative research. They typically use the International System of Units (SI) as a comparison framework.

The SI system reduces all physical measurements to a mathematical combination of seven base units. These are the kilogram, metre, candela, second, ampere, kelvin, and mole.

This makes it easy to compare values between different fields of activity. However, it is important to remember that measures are vulnerable to measurement error.

Precision is a measure of the accuracy of a measuring device and of successive measurements. It is a very useful concept that can help to assess the quality of data.

Misconceptions

Measures are complex concepts and often require students to think critically about them (Hake, 1992; Ray & Beardsley, 2008). A number of misconceptions are associated with measures, which can interfere with understanding how they work.

Some common misconceptions include misunderstanding the role of measurement in statistical investigations and confusions between graphical representations and statistics (Bensley & Lilienfeld, 2015). This study investigated the misconceptions of 213 middle school students.

Using a constructed-response format, the students were asked to judge about the data within various example situations. The results showed that the students endorsed several misconceptions and errors.

The presence of misconceptions was negatively associated with course examination score, irrespective of whether the misconception was held in Tumour Pathology or in one of the other topics. It was also found that the number of misconceptions was significantly higher in questions posed by medical/biomedical students than in questions posed by non-medical/biomedical students.