Cognitive levels of the tasks in Turkish children magazine: a content analysis

Children’s magazines published in a week’s, fifteen days or a month’s time can be described as booklets including stories, activities, poems and contents which serve for education and recreation of children (Wilkerson, 1967). At first glance, by means of their colorful and lively format, children’s magazines catch children’s attention. Children improve their knowledge base by means of numerous values, rhymes, puzzles, games, secret coded messages, and poems taken part in children’s magazines, either independently or with the aid of an adult. All of these properties make children’s magazines differ from other written sources (Wilkerson, 1967). Children’s magazines have been examined in terms of negative messages given by advertisements exist in children’s magazines (Baxter & Perkins, 2012), representation of older characters (Almerico & Fillmer, 1988) and gender norms (Hata, 2014) or fictional and non-fictional contents (Wilkerson, 1967). Although children undergo some cognitive processes through engagement with the tasks in the magazines, no such study was encountered investigating cognitive demands of the tasks in children’s magazines. This study aimed to analyze the cognitive levels of the tasks taken part in a monthly children’s magazine published by TUBİTAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) depending on the taxonomy of Marzano and Kendall (2008) in terms of four components of the cognitive system. The tasks (draw the picture of your star cluster, tell what you are seeing in the picture, draw the way of getting the rabbit to the home, etc.) consisted of this study’s unit of analysis. The investigation of cognitive level of the tasks enables us to understand how and to what degree children are directed to think