A study evaluated the effectiveness of various models constructed to account for how children read and comprehended a story presented in a directed reading lesson. A commercial directed reading lesson was revised to introduce information related to the story and to help the children form a "map" of the central story content. Data were collected from 48 third grade students, who were matched for reading performance and placed in one of two groups that participated in either the commercial lesson or its revised counterpart. A description of the way in which the components of the commercial and the revised lessons influenced story processing was provided through modeling techniques. The models, which assumed that different aspects of the lessons were utilized during reading, were fit to the children's recall of the lesson story. Through comparison of the fit of these models it was found that (1) the revised lesson exerted a greater influence on processing than did the commercial lesson; (2) the points at which the revised lesson made direct contact with the story exerted a greater influence on processing than did the points at which only indirect contact was made; and (3) the questions following each segment of the story and the preparation before the story of the revised lesson exerted greater influence on processing than did other lesson components. (RL)