Today, machine learning (ML) technologies have penetrated almost every aspect of people’s lives, yet public understandings of these technologies are often limited. This highlights the urgent need of designing effective methods to increase people’s machine learning literacy, as the lack of relevant knowledge may result in people’s inappropriate usage of machine learning technologies. In this paper, we focus on an ML-assisted decision-making setting and conduct a human-subject randomized experiment to explore how providing different types of user tutorials as the machine learning literacy interventions can influence laypeople’s reliance on ML models, on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution examples. We vary the existence, interactivity and scope of the user tutorial across different treatments in our experiment. Our results show that user tutorials, when presented in appropriate forms, can help some people rely on ML models more appropriately. For example, for those individuals who have relatively high ability in solving the decision-making task themselves, receiving a user tutorial that is interactive and addresses the specific ML model to be used allows them to reduce their over-reliance on the ML model when they could outperform the model. In contrast, low-performing individuals’ reliance on the ML model is not affected by the presence or the type of user tutorial. Finally, we also find that people perceive the interactive tutorial to be more understandable and slightly more useful. We conclude by discussing the design implications of our study.