Evaluation of Talking Points

TalkingPoints is an interactive personalized messaging platform aimed at increasing communication between parents and teachers, increasing parents’ engagement in their children’s schooling and improving children’s executive functioning skill in grade 3. TalkingPoints has two components. TalkingPoints Multilingual Messaging facilitates communication between teachers and parents by providing an easy-to-use platform that promotes two-way translated messages in over 30 languages. TalkingPoints Coach provides parents tips for communicating with teachers and other information about their children’s schooling. Messages between parents and teachers come directly from TalkingPoints. Both local and federal law requires schools to provide programing intended to promote parental engagement in their children’s education. We assess the effectiveness of TalkingPoints in a school-based randomized field experiment over one school year in 50–65 schools using objective measures of parent communication with schools, engagement with children and children’s executive functioning.