Kate’s current research centres on enhancing informal educational environments to maximise child outcomes. Through this, she hopes to contribute towards gently helping children discover their passions and thoughtfully equipping them to live into their best and healthiest selves, whatever that means to them each day. Her broader research interests include the role of family in out-of-school learning, socio-emotional development, and education-based non-profit evaluation.
The focus of Kate’s doctoral work is to better understand child learning in museum contexts, with a particular emphasis on family visits to the ‘children’s museum’. More specifically, she aims to both identify what impacts such visits can result in, as well as explore how they might be optimally reached; in other words, what about a children’s museum visit makes it a high-quality children’s museum visit.
Prior to beginning the DPhil programme, Kate received her B.S. Psychology with a minor in Business Administration from Carnegie Mellon University and her MSc Education (Child Development and Education) at the University of Oxford, for which she conducted a meta-analysis on the effects of museum intervention on parent-child dyadic conversations.
