Stanford Partners With California Dance Studio For New Research Study

Whenever people think of dance studios or dance academies, they often think of popular media, such as Dance Moms or popular dance studios across the country. Tiffany’s Academy is a well-known dance studio. Located in California’s Tri-Valley, they have teamed up with Stanford University’s Mind Experience and Learning Lab for a research collaboration.

This research collaboration isn’t the first time the studio and a university have worked together. In previous collaborations, they even worked with other universities, such as the University of Pennsylvania, where they studied how dance programs improve executive functions and emotional regulation in childhood.

The purpose of the study is to analyze data from studio programs in classroom observations to understand early childhood’s cognitive, social, and emotional growth.

“Historically, we measure children’s learning through standardized tasks where children sit still, and focus narrowly on pen and paper tasks, tasks on an iPad, or those that mirror more what we would expect to see in a school environment,” said Stanford’s Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education Dr. Monica Ellwood-Lowe.

“But young children are developing all sorts of important skills in a variety of different ways. This is an amazing way to study children’s skill learning in a more embodied context: how do they learn to follow expressions that inhibit one movement in favor of another?” she continued.

The original idea for this study came in early 2025, when the dance studio’s founder, Tiffany Henderson, was pursuing a Master’s degree in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. At the university, she was interested in learning and cognition, where she studied dancers before and after practice.

“During my master’s, there was one particular neuroscience class that I had with Dr. Alison Mackey, where we were talking about brain development, well-being in executive function, and listening to what helps executive function specifically in preschoolers. It occurred to me that it all involves the elements of a dance class,” Henderson says.

After that, she had conversations with Mackey about exploring the conversation further; it was recommended that she work with Ellwood-Lowe at Stanford. Despite her lack of background, she found Henderson’s study interesting and worked together on the topic to further explore it.

“To me, one of the most interesting parts of learning is how dynamic it is over time. It’s not like you learn something once and all of a sudden you’re done, you’ve mastered it, it takes time, and some days she regresses a little, and others you leap forward. I think we’ll be able to capture this complexity by measuring the changes we make and children’s dance learning, and find-grained ways.” Ellwood continued.

In the middle of January, recruitment will start, with dance lessons beginning in February. The schedule calls for dancers ages 3 to 4 to have a 40-minute class per week, and the project will run for 8 weeks. The elements of the study can be manipulated, such as making the session longer or requiring students to remember the sequences to see which part of their brains is most affected. The participants will also be wearing special glasses to track eye movements and brain function and see what their brains are doing during the exercise.

Students participating in the dance studio will come from all four of Tiffany Dance Academy’s locations.

“It’s interesting because sometimes dance gets undervalued, and I think that understanding the multisensory embodied movement, all the things that are happening in a human being, regardless of age, in dance class, could inform our understanding of executive function and perhaps influence education policy. I see that as being hugely important and lastly, just finding a measurement for executive function. This could potentially be a new measurement,” Henderson explained.

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