This study examined the influence of prior knowledge on the quality of elementary students' responses to 3 process-approach tasks: writing, conferencing, and revising. Fourth-grade students were screened for conferencing ability. Next, 20 high-knowledge and 20 low-knowledge students were identified on a test of baseball knowledge. Finally, students wrote stories about a baseball game, participated in peer conferences, and revised. Propositional text bases of first and second drafts and comments from conferences were analyzed with Voss, Vesonder, and Spilich's baseball grammar. It was predicted that high knowledge would be related to greater proportions of information about the goals of a baseball game and that low knowledge would be related to greater proportions of non-goal-related information. These predictions were confirmed. Prior knowledge was found to be related to goal-related information in high-knowledge writers' first and second drafts and to comments from conferences with high-knowledge respond...