What is a primary indicator that a student may have comprehension issues?

Difficulty summarizing content serves as a primary indicator that a student may struggle with comprehension. Summarizing requires a deep understanding of the material, as it involves distilling key ideas and main points while filtering out extraneous information. If a student has trouble summarizing a text, this often reflects difficulties in grasping the concepts and relationships within the material.

While other factors such as slow reading speed or a preference for auditory learning might influence a student's overall academic performance, they do not directly signal comprehension skills. Inability to memorize facts, for example, could be linked to other cognitive processes and does not necessarily reflect a lack of understanding of the content. Therefore, the challenge of summarization points more directly to underlying comprehension issues.