http://xkcd.com/1725/ This comic is another great example of allowing your student to demonstrate statistical comprehension by explaining why a comic is funny. What does the r^2 indicate? When would it be easy to guess the direction of the correlation?  More on that via this previous blog post .

Make pretty Venn diagrams via this archived version of the Google Doodle that celebrated John Venn's 180th birthday. A good example of a Venn diagram as well as a way to (approximately) illustrate shared variance. The overlap between vegetation and things that can fly

Kristoffer Magnusson is a psychology graduate student with a background in web design and he is using his talents to create succinct, beautiful visualizations of statistical concepts. Below is a screenshot of his interactive tool for a better understanding of correlation and how it relates to shared variance (users can change the n -size and r and watch the corresponding changes in shared variance and the scatter plot). Follow Magnussen's work and statistical visualizations via  @rpsychologist . Special thanks to Randy McCarthy for recommending this resource! Using the "Slide me" bar at the top, you can adjust the correlation in order to visualize the scatter plot, slope, and shared variance.

Jess Hagy illustrates her observations about life using simple graphs . I use her illustrations in order to provide examples to my students. Does this illustrate a positive or negative correlation? Property of Jess Hagy Would a correlation detect this relationship? Why or why not?  Property of Jess Hagy According to this diagram, what two different factors may account for the shared variance between the two variables?  Property of Jess Hagy