Abstract
Students in grades 5, 7, 9, 11, and college were first taught to play a board game by watching a demonstration film and then were given the task of writing directions for the game. These written explanations were analyzed to examine grade-related changes in the overall informativeness of the explanations, in the kinds of elements that students tended to explain adequately, in the extent to which students included orienting information for their readers, and in the degree to which students adopted elements of a formal (or “official”) approach when explaining the game. The results provide a rich description of the growth of students' informative writing skills between the upper-elementary grades and the beginning of college.