Teaching Cognitive Skill through Dance: Evidence for near but Not Far Transfer

Abstract

Can the study of dance lead to enhanced academic skills? Dance is an art form that makes use of a wide variety of cognitive skills and may call upon many of the intelligences identified by Howard Gardner in his theory of multiple intelligences.1 Clearly dance involves nonverbal spatial and musical intelligence. Dance also may call upon linguistic intelligence, when students learn the verbal vocabulary of dance or when they discuss and evaluate a dance sequence. Because dancers typically work as a group, a dance program may teach skills in interpersonal intelligence. And because dancers are taught to express their feelings through movement, dance may help people become more aware of themselves and hence may help to develop intrapersonal intelligence. Dance programs may also help children to focus and work hard, and children who engage in dance may actually gain more energy for their academic work. Dance, thus, engages students in many ways, and it is conceivable that because of its multifaceted nature, dance, when well taught, can lead to cognitive outcomes in other areas besides the learning of dance. And indeed, dance educators have sometimes made such a claim.2 In what follows, we report the results of two very small meta-analyses testing the claims that dance instruction leads to improvements in reading and improvements in nonverbal reasoning. General Method