The effectiveness of mapping for middle school students was tested, using 11 eighth graders who were taught to map short expository prose passages during approximately 12 hours of instruction. Mapping is an innovative reading comprehension strategy in which students identify the important relationships defining the text structure and re-represent the interconnected ideas symbolically, thereby producing a diagrammatic representation of text meaning. In a static group comparison, the subjects who mapped two passages recalled a greater proportion of idea units than did the control subjects, who used their own preferred reading strategy. The differences in recall were statistically significant for the 24-hour delayed recall following one passage, and approached significance for the immediate recall following the second passage. For both passages, the probability of recalling mapped idea units was significantly greater than the probability of recalling unmapped idea units. These results suggest that the mapping strategy may help students process text in a way that facilitates recall. (Author/RL)