A study examined how topic interest and brief metacognitive strategy instruction affected learning from reading. Subjects were 81 third graders (33 females, 48 males) randomly assigned to 4 groups. All the students attended 1 of 10 third-grade classes in an elementary school located in a middle- and lower-socioeconomic status area in central Georgia. The students participated in an 8-week instructional program in which half of the children received metacognitive instruction and half of the children received no instruction. Half of the children in each group read in areas of their interest and half read in areas that were not of interest. Brief metacognitive strategy instruction, and not topic interest, was found to have the only effect on children's ability to recall information from texts they had read. Children in the metacognitive strategy instructional program were likely to reread books if they had low prior knowledge in the subject area. This was not the case for children in the control group. (Contains 22 references and 2 tables of data.) (Author/RS)