ABSTRACTFifty‐four junior high school remedial readers served as subjects in this research study designed to examine the use of prediction during the silent reading of short stories with surprise endings. Investigated were the effects of instructional setting and content familiarity upon overall reading comprehension, literal comprehension, inferential comprehension, and interest. Verbal predictions and supportive evidence generated by students in the two prediction treatment groups at the story midpoint and climax were also examined. Data analyses revealed that both inferential comprehension and interest were negatively influenced by the use of the prediction strategy and that students in both prediction treatment groups had difficulty predicting accurately and supporting predictions with a combination of textual and scriptal information. Interest preferences related to the familiarity variable were presen