Teaching Cognitive Skill Through Dance: Evidence For Near But Not Far Transfer

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. 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. 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.