ABSTRACT
A few years ago at my university, a student was working on a research project with a colleague that involved correlations. The student told my colleague that she had thought that correlations could only be a negative one or positive one, and did not know they could be values in between. This student’s misunderstanding might not seem remarkable, except that she was a senior psychology major and a good student. By this time in her undergraduate career, she had probably had correlations explained in class no fewer than 10 times. She had passed (with good grades) two statistics courses, one in psychology and one in math, in which she learned to calculate, plot, and interpret correlations. Yet, after all this instruction and experience, here emerged a misconception about correlations.
