The authors assessed the extent to which a generative prereading activity known as Story Impressions (SI), or composing a guess from clues, influences passage recall relative to a more passive prereading activity of reading a Content Preview (CP). The results from 74 eighth-grade students indicated the CP groups equaled the reading-only control groups in recall of the major phrases of the narrative as well as other passage information. As expected, the SI groups significantly exceeded the CP groups and the control groups on both aspects of passage recall. The authors argued that the SI method could be effective because it induced the three fundamental processes that constitute reading comprehension (M. A. Gernsbacher, 1990) and the concomitant "generative learning" effect (M. C. Wittrock, 1989). (Contains 3 tables.)