From the first National Curriculum to the present, dance education in Korea has been regarded as an area of physical education in elementary and secondary education. The contents related dance domain in the national physical education curricula were analyzed and found that the contents are not systematically selected and organized. In addition, it showed lack of consistence of dance related contents in the past and current elementary physical education curriculum. These phenomena resulted from the limited number of research in dance education that are able to provide meaningful knowledge and information for developing dance-related contents in the national elementary physical education curriculum. Thus, the primary purpose of this study is to explore research trends and suggest future research directions in dance education within elementary school physical education. For doing this, a number of articles were searched at KISS and key words such as dance education in elementary schools, creative movement classes, and expressive activity domains were limited. Of 104 articles selected, the articles were analyzed in six-parts: 1) publication journals, 2) type of authors’ career, 3) research domain, 4) research method, 5) research subjects, and 6) situation of dance class. In this study, it was found several limitations with various journal publication, inactive research activity of teacher educator in the elementary level, in-balanced research domain, lack of use of mixed research design, and lack of research on elementary teacher and dance program in after school program. In order to reduce these limitations, four futuristic research tasks were suggested as follows: 1) extending research fields 2) the need of research on standardized dance content system, 3) more research on instructional model in dance education, and 4) the need of research collaboration between university and elementary school.