Gregory Parks (Wake Forest) has published “Race, Cognitive Bias, and the Power of Law Student Teaching Evaluations,” available here. It is a fascinating article, and it made me wonder whether there has ever been an article on student evaluations of ADR professors/courses. I am under the impression that ADR professors/courses receive higher-than-average evaluations; is that true, and if so, how do we understand those atypical results in light of the research of Parks and others? The abstract:

Decades of research shows that students’ professor evaluations are influenced by factors well-beyond how knowledgeable the professor was or how effectively they taught. Among those factors is race. While some students’ evaluative judgments of professors of color may be motivated by express racial animus, it is doubtful that such is the dominant narrative. Rather, what likely takes place are systematic deviations from rational judgment, whereby inferences about other people and situations are illogically drawn. In short, students’ cognitive biases skew how they evaluate professors of color. In this Article, I explore how cognitive biases among law students influence how they perceive and evaluate law faculty of color. In addition, I contend that a handful of automatic associations and attitudes about faculty of color predict how law students evaluate them. Moreover, senior, especially white, colleagues often resist considering the role of race in law students’ evaluations because of their own inability to be mindful of their own cognitive biases. Lastly, given research largely from social and cognitive psychology, I suggest a handful of interventions for law faculty of color to better navigate classroom dynamics.

Hat tip: TaxProf Blog