I recently asked a question on the use of clickers and one comment I got was:
I have a very low-tech clicker technology I use in all my classes. When a student doesn't understand something I say, they raise their hand and ask a question.
But in my experience, this is not always true. In large classes I suspect many questions remain unasked and many people lose track of the subject due to a fear of "looking stupid" in front of a large crowd. In math classes I've taken, I've noticed that small classes (10-20 students) are more similar to a dialogue between students and teacher and large classes (100-200 students) are usually more of a monologue(or a dialogue between teacher and a very small subset of the class).
We even thought the problem was so large that we made a web app to improve the teachers insight on how much students understood.
Is this phenomena known by other students or is this a cultural thing of Sweden where I come from? And if it's a known phenomena, what is the critical class size?