Kat is a DPhil candidate and Researcher at the Department of Education, University of Oxford.
Kat works as a Doctoral Teaching Fellow on the MSc in Applied Linguistics for Language Teaching (ALLT) and is currently assisting Dr Laura Molway on the Responding to Experiences of Second Language Teaching (RESULT) project. In this role, she supports the collection and analysis of survey, interview, and classroom-observation data, including coding lesson observations using the digital COLT protocol and analysing pupil-perception survey data in R. Her previous projects include Phase 2 of the Learning and Teaching Arabic as an Additional Language (AL2) project, where she conducted systematic reviews of experimental and quasi-experimental research on vocabulary and grammar instruction, and a project led by Dr Ariel Lindorff investigating the correspondence between the hierarchical structure of large-scale assessment data and the multilevel statistical models used to represent it, with particular attention to model assumptions, levels of clustering, variance decomposition, and the estimation of socioeconomic inequalities in educational outcomes.
Kat’s doctoral research examines how silent versus aloud reading, with progressively richer feedback from playback and model to AI feedback, affects decoding and incidental vocabulary learning across languages with differing orthographic transparency. Her broader interests include the neurocognitive foundations of language learning, and the application of data analysis and statistical modelling to educational research.
She is also a part of the Nation-Wonnacott Language Learning Lab in Oxford’s Department of Education, an interdisciplinary research group conducting experimental work on language learning mechanisms including statistical learning, second/foreign language acquisition (across speech, vocabulary, and grammar), language learning technologies, and literacy development in children and adults.