Effects of Story Impressions as a Prereading/Writing Activity on Story Comprehension

In this investigation we examined the usefulness of story impressions as a new prereading/writing activity for improving story comprehension. Story impressions are story fragments that enable students to compose an anticipatory model of a yet-to-be-read passage, by giving them clues concerning how characters and events interact within the story. After reading the set of clues, we asked Grade 2 students to compose a story of their own (called a story guess) before reading the author’s actual tale. The results indicated that students in the story impressions group, whether above-or below-average readers, answered more of the postreading test questions correctly than did students who read only the story. In addition, the story impressions preview had an equal effect on both impressions-related and impressions-unrelated test items. The beneficial effects of the story impressions, therefore, were not limited to increased recall of clue-related information. Examination of the “match” (several measures) between the readers’ story guesses and the author’s actual text further demonstrated that the enhanced comprehension scores of the students in the story impressions group were not contingent upon the students’ ability to closely approximate the author’s story in their own story guesses.