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Val Shute retired from FSU at the beginning of 2022. She was the Mack and Effie Campbell Tyner endowed professor of education at Florida State University, and is now Professor Emerita. Before coming to FSU in 2007, she was a principal research scientist at Educational Testing Service (2001–2007), where she worked on basic and applied research related to assessment, cognitive diagnosis, and learning from advanced instructional systems, and where she honed her psychometric skills. Prior to ETS, Val spent two years in industry, and before that was enthusiastically employed at the Air Force Research Lab in San Antonio, Texas (1986–1999).
She earned a Ph.D. in cognitive/educational psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1984), and held a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Learning Research and Development Center.
Her general research interests center on the design, development, and evaluation of advanced systems to support competencies. Towards this end, she has been involved in (a) exploratory and confirmatory tests of aptitude-treatment interactions using the controlled environments offered by intelligent tutoring systems, (b) student modeling research (currently evangelizing the use of evidence-centered design), and (c) developing automated knowledge elicitation and organization tools. A recent example of her research involves using immersive games with stealth assessment to support learning—of both cognitive and noncognitive knowledge and skills. Another example involves externalizing mental models and assessing understanding of complex phenomena. She and her colleagues have developed a suite of model-based tools used to assess understanding and provide the basis for informative, reflective feedback during instruction.