What does a second-grade student’s difficulty in summarizing a passage read aloud indicate about their skills?

When a second-grade student struggles to summarize a passage that has been read aloud, it often indicates challenges with listening comprehension rather than decoding. Summarizing requires the ability to understand and interpret information, which relies heavily on a student's listening comprehension abilities. If the student has strong decoding skills, they would typically be able to read the text independently, but since the passage was read aloud, the focus shifts to how well they can grasp the meaning and main ideas from what they heard.

Thus, difficulty in summarizing suggests that the student may not be effectively processing or retaining the information presented. This inability to synthesize spoken text into a coherent summary points to gaps in their comprehension skills rather than their decoding abilities. Effective inferential reasoning is also not indicated here, as summarizing does not require making inferences but rather understanding the explicit content of the passage. Hence, the difficulty in summarizing relates more closely to listening comprehension than to the decoding or inferential reasoning skills.