THIS STUDY investigated the effects of previewing difficult short stories on students' comprehension, recall, and attitudes. The subjects were 32 eighth-grade students reading at about the fiftli-grade level and 40 seventh-grade students reading at about the thirdgrade level. Materials included four short stories, previews for the stories, multiplechoice comprehension tests composed of both factual and inferential questions, directions for an oral recall task, short-answer comprehension questions, open-ended attitude questions, and an attitude survey. Results on the multiple-choice test indicated that previews significantly (p <.03) increased students' comprehension of the stories, improving factual comprehension by 13% and inferential comprehension by 38%. Results with the other comprehension tasks indicated that the previews significantly (p <.05) increased students' recall of the stories and their scores on the short-answer comprehension test. Students recalled twice as many propositions when they received previews, and their scores on the short-answer test were about 40% higher when they received previews. Results further indicated that students generally liked being given previews of stories and found them useful. The discussion centers on issues of generalizability and on an effect that previews appear to have on the reading process.