A study examined whether junior high remedial reading students could be trained to use a prewriting schema development strategy called "story impressions" to develop schema and engage the reader in active reading of the text in order to improve comprehension of narrative material. Subjects were four classes of seventh, eighth, and ninth grade remedial reading students in a midwestern city. Two classes made up the control group (n=22) and two classes made up the experimental group (n=20). Subjects in the experimental classes received training in using story impression clues, wrote class predicted stories, heard the actual story, discussed it and compared their predicted story to the original story. At the end of 6 weeks, a survey about the process and the stories was administered to the experimental group. Students in the control group developed schema for the stories in teacher-led discussions based on the story titles. Results indicated that students whose schema were focused more on specific aspects of the stories and reinforced with writing did better than those whose schema development was based upon discussion of the title only. (Fifty-seven references are attached.) (SR)