A Study of the Relationships between Teacher Behaviors and Student Performance on a Spatial Kinesthetic Awareness Test.

Dance teacher behaviors have been studied for many years in an attempt to describe what these teachers do in the classroom. One method of describing dance teacher behaviors is to place the behaviors in categories or classes (Gray 1983; Gray 1984a; Skrinar 1986; Skrinar and Moses 1988; Minton 1992; Davenport 1993). Researchers have also attempted to describe dance teacher behaviors by drawing relationships between one behavior category and another. This has been accomplished through the use of proportions, patterns or domain analysis (Lunt 1974; Lord 1981/82; Gray 1984b). More recently, dance teacher behaviors were analyzed by dividing the task presentations into distinct moments: the set-up, presentation, and transition to execution (Lord, Chayer and Girard 1995). In addition, some investigators preferred to classify dance teacher behaviors by describing the type of imagery used during the instruction process (Overby 1990; Overby 1991/92; Minton 1996). Finally, the case study has been used to describe and classify the behaviors of a single dance teacher. Here the researcher carefully examines the instructional style of the dance teacher in order to answer some specific questions (Fortin and Siedentop 1995). Analysis of dance teacher behaviors tells the researcher what the instructor is doing in the classroom. Such investigations, however, provide no information about student learning and how such learning can be related to specific teaching strategies. Studies concerned with the effect of teaching behaviors on students' ability to learn dance movement skills are varied in approach and results. Several early studies were concerned with the effectiveness of films and television used as visual aides to teach various forms of dance (Allen 1968; Bennett 1970). Two other early pieces of research compared teaching methods in order to discover how different methods could affect the learning of dance skills. The dance forms studied included social dance in the first piece of research, and folk, modern and tap dance in the later investi-