Gender, interactive teaching, and barriers to change

Can pedagogy alleviate the well-known "gender gap" in performance and representation in the physical sciences? I will show that women can succeed on par with male students in introductory classes that are taught cooperatively, rather than competitively. At the same time we found that the level of perceived confusion increases in classes that challenge every student to think about and respond to questions asked during class. This increase is a potential barrier to reform even though we have shown it to anti-correlate with performance.