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Much of our understanding of children's reading has been based on research with narratives, where children can rely on relatively rich prior knowledge to make sense of the text. Far less work has been conducted on children's meaning construction processes for nonnarrative, informational texts about unfamiliar topics, such as those often encountered in school content areas. This research examines children's strategies for processing informational text to understand and remember new information. In Experiment 1, 4th‐ and 6th‐grade students thought aloud as they read an easier and a harder passage. They dictated a recall report after each passage. The think‐aloud protocols were analyzed for processing activities, including paraphrasing, elaborating, explaining, monitoring, and identifying and resolving problems. In general, processing tended to focus on the local, sentence level. Self‐explanations were prevalent throughout the protocols; however, they were differentially effective in promoting understanding....