campusreview.com.au
Arty smarties
Students who study creative arts are more likely
to get better grades, research shows.
W
ould you steer a Year 6, 7 or 8 student away from
‘soft’ subjects like art and music to harder ones like
maths and English?
Is your job safe
from robots?
New university tool breaks down the
likelihood of automation in specific jobs.
I
s a robot coming for your job? That’s the question a new
predictive tool asks. It calculates a person’s exposure to
automation and other sources of change in a job and predicts
future developments.
news
Intuitively, it seems that ‘fluffier’ subjects allow for fun
and creativity alone. A new study, however, shows that creative
arts subjects like theatre and dance improve numeracy and
literacy scores.
Researchers from George Mason University in Virginia followed
more than 10,000 mostly low-income Florida students from
Kindergarten to Year 8.
After controlling for all other variables, they discovered that
those who undertook creative arts subjects in middle school
(Years 6–8) “went on to earn significantly higher GPAs and higher
standardised math and reading scores, and were less likely to get
suspended from school, compared to students who were not
exposed to arts classes”.
These students also “showed stronger social, behavioural,
language, motor and cognitive skills seven years earlier in
preschool”, which appears to suggest that more capable students
tend to choose arts electives. Yet the link between arts and high
grades was established even when the researchers controlled for
these skills.
“These are meaningful, important and ecologically valid
measures of actual student performance,” the researchers
wrote in ‘Predictors of, and Benefits From, Elective Arts Classes
(Music, Drama, Visual Art, Dance) in Middle School among
Ethnically Diverse Children in Poverty’, published in Psychology of
Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.
With black students the least likely to be enrolled in arts classes,
they contended that access to arts education “can be seen as an
issue of social justice”. ■
“Experts predict 50 per cent of all jobs will be lost by 2030,”
the tool warns.
“Enter your details and in less than a minute find out how
exposed you are.”
Developed by the University of New England, the Future of
Work Predictor breaks down the Australian economy into over
3000 different jobs and then thousands of separate tasks to
determine the degree of likely change.
For example, the tool says a Sydney-based journalist with a
bachelor’s degree should expect to write much more advertising,
promotional or informational material in a decade, while spending
less time providing educational information to the public and
collaborating with others in marketing activities.
Meanwhile, a university lecturer with a master’s degree living
in Melbourne should expect less change to their profession than
the journalist.
Although, the predictor says that by 2030 they would spend
less time advising students on academic and career matters and
more time attending training sessions or professional meetings to
develop or maintain professional knowledge.
Both the journalist and the lecturer can expect that their job
will be relatively unaffected by the impact of automation, as well
as the need to be more productive, and supply and demand.
The Future of Work Predictor also walks users through wages
and employment growth and how their qualification compares to
others in their occupation.
The University of New England team used economic
modelling firm AlphaBeta to figure out the degree of change
for each occupation. ■
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