Valerie J. Shute

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 was involved with basic and applied research projects related to assessment, cognitive diagnosis, and learning from advanced instructional systems and where she generally honed her psychometric skills. Prior to ETS, Val worked in industry for two years, and before that, she 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 hover around the design, development, and evaluation of advanced systems to support competencies. Towards this end, she's 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. An example of recent research involves using immersive games with stealth assessment to support learning—of cognitive and noncognitive knowledge and skills. Another example of current research involves externalizing mental models and assessing understanding of complex phenomena. She and her colleagues have been developing a suite of model-based tools that are used to assess understanding and provide the basis for informative and reflective feedback during instruction.

		Valerie J. Shute Professor Emerita Ed Psych and Learning Systems FSU, Tallahassee, FL 32306-4453 Map Contact vshute@fsu.edu


Home Page Publications Teaching Research Personal	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 was involved with basic and applied research projects related to assessment, cognitive diagnosis, and learning from advanced instructional systems and where she generally honed her psychometric skills. Prior to ETS, Val worked in industry for two years, and before that, she 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 hover around the design, development, and evaluation of advanced systems to support competencies. Towards this end, she's 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. An example of recent research involves using immersive games with stealth assessment to support learning—of cognitive and noncognitive knowledge and skills. Another example of current research involves externalizing mental models and assessing understanding of complex phenomena. She and her colleagues have been developing a suite of model-based tools that are used to assess understanding and provide the basis for informative and reflective feedback during instruction.