Psychology Roots
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Norm
A Norm is a rule or for acceptable behavior that is understood by people within a population. For example, wearing a bikini at the beach is expected (and thus, an acceptable behavior, or norm), but wearing one in a church setting is frowned upon. The word “norm” is also used to standardize tests and create a scoring system or baseline from the average scores of the group. For example, If educators wish to test their 4th grade class on math equations, they need to know what the normal scores were for another equally matched 4th grade class. If they used the average scores from a group of college students majoring in math, the 4th grade scores would all fall far below the baseline.
