To understand what kinds of mental processing take place during reading and how the child encodes information that is presented, a study investigated the comprehension of a story by asking the reader to take part actively in the decision-making of the protagonist. Subjects, 56 children from a fourth- and sixth-grade class at an elementary school in Dayton (Ohio), were given true-false comprehension and multiple choice recognition tests after viewing a story on a computer screen. Half of the children were in a "choices" group and told that during certain parts of the story, they would be asked by the computer to help the main character by making a selection from alternatives A or B for the particular dilemma. Results indicated that the opportunity to make choices for the protagonist facilitated the comprehension and recognition scores of the children who were given that chance. (Two figures are included.) (MS)