NDEO research in dance education project.

The National Dance Education Organization (NDEO) will debut an important new product at its fifth annual conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, October 15-19. The Research in Dance Education database (RDEdb) is the result of a three-year project funded by the U.S. Department of Education to unearth decades of work in dance education buried in libraries, archives, and independent collections all over the U.S. (see "Dance Educators Get $677,,000 to Prove Their Worth," News, DANCE MAGAZINE May 2001, page 40).

With more than 2,500 entries, RDEdb is a library of detailed and cross-referenced information on research activities in dance education, including techniques, methodologies, summary analyses, and other descriptive information, which dates back to 1926, when the first academic program in dance was established at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Flee citation information is available at www.ndeo.org, and NDEO members and institutions can access additional levels of detail. Additional published and unpublished research can be submitted for review by completing an interactive from on the NDEO Web site.

NDEO has also announced a new Center for Research in Dance Education at Temple University in Philadelphia. Visitors interested in scholarly research can access the most extensive level of database information from this location. (More details about the center will be introduced at a Research Institute to be held at Temple University January 16-17, 2004.

For information and registration, contact [e-mail].)

With RDEdb, dance educators now have a tool to address one of the biggest issues plaguing progress to dance education in America's schools--the lack of access to research that could substantiate their claims about the benefits of a dance education.

"Literature, and the research within, existed--we just didn't know where, by whom, date, locations, substance, or implications," Jane Bonbright, NDEO executive director, writes in the Journal of Dance Education. Bonbright says the task of locating existing research is complicated by the fact that dance education research is often included in periodicals or literature on other disciplines, such as anthropology, ethnography, educational psychology, physical education, and somatics and body therapies. She also points out that dissertations and theses are often not searchable via the Internet because universities don't always submit these unpublished materials to digital dissertation services.

In the summer of 2000, dozens of Research in Dance Education reviewers across the nation began looking at primary source materials from 109 graduate dance programs and universities and 190 publications and periodicals. They found hundreds of documents: published materials, unpublished master's theses. doctoral dissertations, conference reports and proceedings, and other independent monographs that have not received wide distribution. To make sense of it all. the project team invented the "Grid Matrix," Imagine a bank of mailboxes, like you might see at a post office, but organized in a slightly different way. These "boxes" all receive mail on one broad topic--research in dance education Each "letter" that comes into the post office is reviewed, then copies are assigned delivery to one or more mailboxes, depending on how many dance-related topics the document addresses.

The top row of the mailboxes is divided into twenty categories ("Issues"), such as dance education and health, or creative processes, or student achievement. Along the left side of the mailbox bank, running from top to bottom, are fourteen different "Populations Served" (or the "people" to whom letters are written) including higher education, private studios, or K-5 teachers. Beneath this category is a list of twenty-seven aspects of work in dance education ("Areas of Service") that the letter pertains to, including such things as advocacy, dance science and medicine, or child development and dance.

When you look into any mailbox, you'll see that letters have been accumulating for decades. In the back of the mailbox are those from the 1930s; toward the front are recent ones. No one has been to the post office!

By simply tallying the number of letters in each mailbox for "Issues," "Populations Served," and "Areas of Service." you can get one sense of interest in any topic. By ranking the tallied scores you begin to understand where investments have been made in our field. And by ordering the documents into specific time periods, and looking at their development (or lack thereof) over time, you get yet another sense of where energies have been focused.

For example, of the fourteen "Populations Served," the greatest number of research entries is for higher education (869 entries). Primary and secondary education received the next two highest (355 and 348 entries, respectively). Dance artists in education received 240 entries. Addressed least often are after-school programs (39), outreach (7), and seniors/elderly (5).

Of the twenty "Issues" tracked, the arts education mailbox is quite full, fob lowed in number of entries by creative process, kinesthetic learning, learning styles and theory, and health. There's been much less research on funding of dance education, development and use of written standards for teaching dance, brain research, student performance, and uncertified teachers.

This is just an example of the findings RDE has begun to uncover, and to discuss them in these terms is an oversimplification. Determining whether significant numeric differences indicate the relevance of an issue, or whether they represent inherent difficulties in researching an issue's manifestation in an educational setting, are the next considerations. Two publications will be developed regarding RDE findings--the "RDE Report to the Nation," an overview of project results, and the more comprehensive "RDE Report to the Field" for dance education researchers and administrators.

RDEdb can help identify the patterns, trends, and gaps in dance education-related research, and will benefit a wide range of dance educators, from dance school owners who are looking for useful information in dance science, to graduate students seeking new and exciting research topics, to seasoned researchers.

People attending the NDEO annual conference in October can reserve time to test drive the database. For more information, visit www.ndeo.org.

Thomas K. Hagood, Ph.D., is associate professor and director of dance at Florida International University and author of A History of Dance in American Higher Education: Dance and the American University (Mellen Press, 2000). A past and founding president of NDEO, he served as an RDE Project content area chair.