If you’re one of the few people who hasn’t seen the viral video of Chinese school principal Zhang Pengfei, then check it out now.

In the clip, which has been viewed by millions of people, Pengfei leads his pupils through a mesmerising choreographed dance routine in the school yard. He decided to teach the kids the shuffle-dance routine, as he was concerned that they were spending too much time staring at screens rather than exercising.

But what he perhaps didn’t realise was that while he was giving students a physical workout, he was also giving them a mental workout that could - apparently - help to improve the children’s cognitive performance. At least that’s what some research appears to suggest.

Professor Miriam Giguere, from the department of performing arts at Westphal College of Media Arts and Design in Philadelphia, US, says that her own research, as well as additional research undertaken by academics Judith Lynne Hanna, Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein, and Edward Warburton, suggests that students display increased cognitive activity when they are involved in dance. She adds that the fact it nurtures specific skills of sequence memory, pattern recognition and problem-solving fluency has been well documented.

In addition, she says there is evidence to suggest that group thinking, understanding of abstraction and collaborative skills can also be developed through dance. And that’s not all.

“There is documentation that schools with dance programmes have greater rates of attendance and student retention,” she states. “Dance has been shown to enhance emotional wellbeing in children, something it shares with other expressive arts, and it has been shown to improve conflict resolution.

“It improves gross motor skills, and has been successful in enhancing integration of special needs and foreign-language learners into classroom activities.

“There are also lots of uses of dance as a tool to transmit cultural understanding and knowledge, and there has been lots of research suggesting that dance builds community within classrooms or groups of participants.”

That’s quite a collection of benefits, yet there are apparently even more. Giguere explains that there is evidence to suggest that activity-based learning, including dance, can increase recognition of letters or shapes and certain mathematical or scientific principles.

Get into the flow

So what’s going on here? Why might dance - or “movement-type interventions”, as Michael Duncan, professor in applied sport and exercise science at Coventry University, describes it - appear to enhance cognitive performance in children? And could it really be true?

“There are a number of pieces of research highlighting that moderate-intensity exercise increases blood flow - and therefore oxygen - to the frontal lobe of the brain, which is where we make our decisions, which might be a likely mechanism for the improved cognitive performance we see,” explains Duncan.

He adds that he has done some work looking at dance in adults that shows very similar improvements in cognitive performance. “However, it’s likely that with dance there is a combination of moderate-intensity exercise coupled with an activity that requires attention and use of memory,” says Duncan. “Combined, this may stimulate improvement in cognitive performance. The same argument can be made for badminton, football, etc, so I wouldn’t think it’s dance specifically.”

Duncan’s assessment is shared by Lois Hetland, professor of art education at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Hetland co-authored a 2000 study, Teaching cognitive skill through dance: evidence for near but not far transfer, with Mia Keinänen and Ellen Winner, which looked at whether or not the study of dance could lead to enhanced academic skills.

Hetland says that studies undertaken by the likes of Ann Podlozny, who wrote the 2000 paper Strengthening verbal skills through the use of classroom drama: a clear link, show that drama has strong cognitive transfer (the ability to apply knowledge, skills, and practices across time and contexts). However, she finds that evidence surrounding the transfer of learning using dance, which was explored in great depth in her own study, is not as compelling.

“Because mechanism is not determined in either analysis, and because the dance meta-analysis looks at spatial outcomes while the drama meta-analysis looks at verbal outcomes, it’s a reach to suggest cognitive transfer [occurs] through dance,” says Hetland. “But I do offer the hypothesis that when creative dance/movement is used as a vehicle for actively using ideas about other content, it may be effective because of the embodied attention learners engage in through dancing.

“I think that embodied attention is also what causes the drama transfer. But it’s all unproven. A hypothesis. A reasoned guess.”

So does that mean dance is not as effective for “brain training” as some would hope? More research is clearly needed, but for some teachers, there is probably enough hope in the results so far to warrant a Samba in science or a Macarena in maths if they really do feel compelled to get their students moving. And if they film it and stick it on YouTube, they may even end up as famous as Zhang Pengfei.

Simon Creasey is a freelance writer

This article originally appeared in the 8 March 2019 issue under the headline “‘I say, we can dance if we want to’”