The Educational Psychology department is proud to recognize Kaycie Barron, a current PhD student in the Learning Sciences area, as the recipient of the 2026 Michael Vincent O’Shea and Harriet Frisbie Eastabrooks O’Shea Fellowship. The O’Shea Fellowship is awarded to an Educational Psychology student who shows promise in adolescent or educational psychology, the education of children or adolescents, or the psychotherapy or guidance of children or adolescents.
In The Responsible AI for Learning (TRAIL) Lab, Kaycie focuses on advancing equitable outcomes for bi/multilingual learners and promoting human-centered AI applications in K-12 education. Her research explores linguistic biases in large language models and how translanguaging and language variation affect model performance.
Reflecting on this award, Kaycie writes:
I study how K–12 bi/multilingual learners (MLs) use their language backgrounds as a toolkit for scientific sensemaking. My work is grounded in translanguaging theory, which frames students’ strategic use of their full linguistic repertoires as a resource for learning. I examine how these practices support reasoning and participation during adolescence and how they are often overlooked in the development of educational technologies.
I am proud to represent the Learning Sciences area and the Responsible AI for Learning Lab (TRAIL) through this recognition. As a researcher in TRAIL, my work sits at the intersection of classroom instruction, psycholinguistics, and educational technology. During the coming academic year, my research will build on sustained partnerships with K–12 STEM classrooms across multiple Wisconsin school districts. This work includes classroom observations, teacher interviews, and analyses of student discourse to better understand how MLs reason and participate during instruction. In parallel, I will examine how educational AI tools interpret multilingual language practices and where linguistic bias leads these systems to mischaracterize MLs’ understanding.
I am deeply honored to receive the O’Shea Fellowship. This support provides protected time to work closely with educators and students in authentic, linguistically diverse learning environments. It allows me to advance research that treats adolescents’ language practices as evidence of thinking rather than as deficits, and to translate those insights into the development of more responsible educational technologies. I am thankful for the mentorship and support of the faculty, teachers, students, family, and friends who make this work possible.
Congrats to Kaycie on this accomplishment!