Forty first-grade children and 40 fourth-grade children participated in a study that sought to determine if age-related increases in memory for prose are due, in part, to deliberate mnemonic strategies and if older children use the higher-order relations in prose more efficiently than do younger children. Each child listened to a tape-recorded passage. To induce deliberate mnemonic strategies, half of the children were informed that there would be a memory task; the rest were not told. Without contextual information, high-order relations in the passage could not be discerned. Half of the children were presented contextual information; the remaining were not. After passage presentation, each child was asked to reconstruct the story. Results indicated that age-related increases in memory for prose were, in part, due to the development of deliberate mnemonic strategies. Furthermore, if contextual information were available, older and younger children efficiently retained the analysis of the high-order relations extracted from prose. (Author/AA)