I did some research and I think what I am looking for can be accomplished with Javascript, which I am pretty foreign to - so any help would be greatly appreciated.

Pretty simple I just want to create a little form in which users will be able to "rate" articles on my site 1-10 (options 1-10 would be in a drop down box). User choses what they rate the article as, click submit. Just below it I am hoping to have it be something like "Average 8.9 out of 55 votes" for example.

Can someone help?

You ARE using a database right...?

Dahol, you can't use javascript alone to accomplish this task, because javascript doesn't have any means of storing collected data (the votes) at a central point.

PHP would be a better choice, as this runs server side where you CAN store all the votes.

You can use javascript in combination with PHP to let users submit their votes without having to reload the page. This technology is called AJAX and a google search will give you plenty of tutorials and documentation.

you might want to take a look at http://fameter.zoopin.com. It is a javascript based rating system that allows visitors to rate webpages. You have some control over how the rating scale is displayed.

To achieve what you are asking for it is best to use a Database to store the ratings, so by using the power of Javascript, PHP and MySQL you can easily achieve what you are looking for.

Javascript would be used to check the form for errors before posting
PHP would handle the form and insert the information into the database
MySQL is the database engine used to store the information