Investigates the ability of 757 children aged 8, 11, 14, and 18 years to judge the importance of intraepisodic and interepisodic story statements on the basis of their causal properties. Children in all groups judged statements with many intraepisodic causal relations as being more important than statements with few such relations. (RJC)

Offers an interpretive frame for viewing children's growth as creators of imaginative worlds. Suggests that writing development depends not only on children's discovery of cognitive and linguistic strategies but on children's discovery that writing can help authors create coherence in their worlds beyond texts. (MS)

This study examined the ability of writers at two ages and three ability levels in generating textually-consistent superordinate main ideas and subordinate details for three types of text structures. Subjects were 62 third and 61 sixth graders. Analyses revealed significant main effects for grade, ability, and text type. (TJH)