Co-Director, Center For Learning & Development, SRI Education
Todd Grindal, EdD, studies the impacts of policies and programs on young children and children with disabilities. He is the principal investigator of a Child Care Policy Research Partnership project examining how early childhood educators in Arkansas child care programs interpret and implement state policies designed to reduce the use of suspension and expulsion. Grindal recently completed evaluation and strategic planning activities focused on early childhood systems building for the Virginia Early Childhood foundation. In other Virginia focused work, Grindal conducted an evaluation of the Virginia Preschool Initiative Plus program which included a regression discontinuity design study that leveraged 4 years of test data to examine the causal impact of preschool enrollment on children’s early academic skills.
Before joining SRI, Grindal led a range of evaluation and technical assistance projects. For the National Research Center on Hispanic Children and Families, Grindal and colleagues used integrated administrative data to provide new insights into the participation of young Hispanic children in publicly funded early care and education programs. In other work conducted as part of the Secondary Analysis of Variation in Impacts of Head Start Center, Grindal and colleagues used innovative analytic methods to understand how the impacts of Head Start varied by the type of care children would have otherwise received. The article summarizing this work, on which Grindal is a coauthor, was awarded the 2016 Applied Research Award for Advances in Methodology by the American Education Research Association.
Grindal has authored numerous peer-reviewed publications, regularly presents his work at scholarly conferences, and has been an invited speaker at the United Nations. He is the coauthor of a paper examining methods for determining subgroup impacts that was awarded the 2018 journal article of the year from the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness. He is the coeditor of a 2020 special issue of the Early Childhood Quarterly examining access, utilization, and impacts of early care and education among Latino families.
Grindal conducted his master’s and doctoral work at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where he was awarded a Julius B. Richmond Fellowship by the Harvard Center on the Developing Child. Before beginning his doctoral studies, Grindal worked for 6 years as an elementary and preschool teacher and school administrator.
Key projects
- Reducing Exclusionary Discipline in Arkansas Early Childhood Programs
- Virginia Early Childhood Foundation
- Ready to Learn
- Survey of Head Start Disability Coordinators
- VPI+
Recent publications
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Reimagining Instructional Coaching: Developing Observation Tools to Support Instructional Coaching in Pre-K Classrooms
Instructional coaching can improve teaching quality in early learning classrooms. SRI Education, in collaboration with Substantial and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, created a Target Product Profile detailing the ideal features of observation tools to support instructional coaching.
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Sound Town Evaluation Report
Digital learning programs are a promising tool to support teachers in providing students with strong early literacy instruction, but more research is needed to understand their effectiveness. This report describes an experimental study that examined the impact of Sound Town, a digital early literacy program, on prekindergarten students’ early literacy skills.
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Sparking Connections: Evaluations of Mobile Messaging on Responsive Caregiving
Mobile messaging programs are a low-cost, scalable approach to building parents’ knowledge and capacity to support their children’s development. These programs directly deliver simple and straightforward information, tips, and activities that parents can incorporate into daily routines.
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Associations of teacher characteristics with preschool suspensions and expulsions: Implications for supports
Preschool children subjected to suspension and expulsion miss valuable educational opportunities and are more likely to experience academic failure and grade retention. These forms of exclusionary discipline are more frequent in preschool settings than in K–12 education classrooms.
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Early Childhood Throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Experiences of Arkansas Educators
This brief, which represents the second of two reports, highlights findings from a second sample of Arkansas (AR) educators who completed surveys and focus groups in spring 2021.
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Early Childhood Education During the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Experiences of Arkansas Educators
SRI International and the National Center on Children in Poverty collected information on how Arkansas early care providers are implementing state COVID-19-related guidelines and coping with the challenges related to these guidelines.