Tour of research on student evaluations of teaching [10-12]: Huston 2006, Baldwin and Blattner 2003, and Pittman 2010

Let's continue our discussion of studies in Holman et al. 2019 "Evidence of Bias in Standard Evaluations of Teaching" listed as "finding bias". See here for the first entry in the series and here for other entries.

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10.

Huston 2006 "Race and Gender Bias in Higher Education: Could Faculty Course Evaluations Impede Further Progress toward Parity" is a review that, as far as I can tell, does not report novel data on unfair sex or race bias in student evaluations of teaching.

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11.

Baldwin and Blattner 2003 "Guarding Against Potential Bias in Student Evaluations: What Every Faculty Member Needs to Know" doesn't report novel data about unfair bias in student evaluations. I don't know why that publication would be classified under "academic articles, book chapters, and working papers finding bias".

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12.

Pittman 2010 "Race and Gender Oppression in the Classroom: The Experiences of Women Faculty of Color with White Male Students" discusses interviews with 17 nonwhite female faculty. Here is a sample from one of the interviews, from page 190:

Now I can't prove that these are racial events, OK. But I have some supposition that they may be racially motivated...the occurrence of...white males...much more predominantly white males, are coming into my class and questioning my expertise...whereas I don't believe, and I can't prove this, but I don't believe that they go into their chemistry class and challenge their chemistry white male,...now that may be gender as well as race. Because I just don't think that they'd go to some of their other classes and question or challenge their professors in ways that I've been questioned or challenged.

This study doesn't provide much evidence of unfair bias in student evaluations, although the article does note that "Several women faculty of color talked about low course evaluation ratings from race- and gender-privileged students and expressed their fear of how these might affect their departmental merit reviews" (p.191).

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Comments are open if you disagree, but I don't think that any of these three studies report a novel test for unfair sex or race bias in student evaluations of teaching using a research design with internal validity.