Changing beliefs about the benefit of statistical knowledge

In this day and age, statistically-based information is nearly omnipresent in daily media like newspapers or TV. Therefore, people need skills to read and interpret such information adequately. Due to the fact that previous research shows that sometimes statistical knowledge was improved without seeing the usefulness of this knowledge, we focus on improving both statistical knowledge and beliefs about the benefit of statistical knowledge. We examine whether a short-term (two hours) intervention has measurable influence on knowledge and beliefs of students at school and university, who have different mathematical foci. In this paper we discuss the design of our study and mainly focus on the intervention.