Profile summary
Berry Billingsley specialises in Science Education and leads the LASAR (Learning about Science and Religion) research team at Canterbury Christ Church University.
For more details about LASAR please see www.LASARcentre.com and www.NeverOffTopic.com
A three-minute story by the BBC can be viewed here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19974380
Berry's interests include Epistemic Insight (see www.EpistemicInsight.com), young people's engagement in science, artificial intelligence, Big Questions bridging the sciences and humanities and also the communication of science and technology news in the media.
Berry's first career was with the BBC where she produced and presented television and radio programmes including BBC World Service's 'Science in Action', BBC TV's 'Tomorrow’s World' and BBC Education's 'Search out Science'. She then travelled to Melbourne, Australia, to become a senior project manager with the Department of Education. In this role she produced television and online resources to support science teaching in schools.
Research and knowledge exchange
Principal Investigator for the following grants
Evolution on Rural Tour, The Wellcome Trust, 2016, £19,983.
Research to discover the efficacy of science-related activities in raising primary and secondary school students’ understanding of global concerns relating to health and nutrition. Pearson, 2015, £20,000
Creating strategies for primary teachers to teach evolutionary science and its applications, The Wellcome Trust, 2014-15, £27,903
Being Human: Discovering and Advancing School Students' Perceptions of the Relationships between Science and Religion, Templeton World Charity Foundation (TWCF), 2014-17, £613,656
Evaluation of God and the Big Bang, TWCF, 2014-17, £75,400
Research to explore and evaluate the ways in which Exploring Science supports formative assessment, Pearson, 2014, £15,000
The Nature-Nurture narrative and other explanatory models of human behaviour in the Humanities curriculum for secondary schools in England, The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, 2012-13, £20,000
The LASAR (Learning about science and religion) Project, the John Templeton Foundation, 2008-12, £547,000
Teaching Science to students with visual impairment funded by University of Reading in collaboration with Porto University, 2011, £900
Additional collaborative grants:
The contribution of natural history museums to science education, PI Michael Reiss, The Wellcome Trust, 2014-5, £68,076
Teaching and subject expertise
Science education for various undergraduate and postgraduate teacher education courses;
PhD, Ed D and Masters’ supervision
External activities
Royal Society of Biology Primary Curriculum Committee
Editorial Reviewer for a range of journals including
Research in Science Education (Springer),
Journal of Biological Education (Taylor and Francis),
Teacher development (Taylor and Francis),
Curriculum Journal (Taylor and Francis).
Publications and research outputs
- Billingsley, B., Brock, R., Taber, K. S., & Riga, F. (2016). How Students View the Boundaries Between Their Science and Religious Education Concerning the Origins of Life and the Universe. Science Education, doi:10.1002/sce.21213 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sce.21213/pdf
- Billingsley, B. (2016). Ways to prepare future teachers to teach science in multicultural classrooms. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 11(2), 283-291. doi:10.1007/s11422-015-9701-9
- Taber, K. S., Billingsley, B., Riga, F., & Newdick, H. (2015). English secondary students’ thinking about the status of scientific theories: consistent, comprehensive, coherent and extensively evidenced explanations of aspects of the natural world–or just ‘an idea someone has’. Curriculum Journal, 26(3), 370-403.
- Billingsley, B., Riga, F., Taber, K. S., & Newdick, H. (2014). Secondary school teachers’ perspectives on teaching about topics that bridge science and religion. Curriculum Journal, 25(3), 372-395. doi:10.1080/09585176.2014.920264
- Billingsley, B., Taber, K. S., Riga, F., & Newdick, H. (2013). Secondary school students’ epistemic insight into the relationships between science and religion—a preliminary enquiry. Research in Science Education, 43(4), 1715-1732. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11165-012-9317-y
- Taber, K. S., Billingsley, B., Riga, F., & Newdick, H. (2011). Secondary students' responses to perceptions of the relationship between science and religion: Stances identified from an interview study. Science Education, 1-26. doi:10.1002/sce.20459
Book chapters
- Billingsley, B., Nassaji, M., Costa, A., & Chappell, K. (2016). What do teenagers believe about the soul? Findings from a survey and interview study with upper secondary school students. In N. Spurway (Ed.), Science and Religion Forum 40th Anniversary Book. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge scholar publishing.
- Billingsley, B. (2013). Students’ Perceptions of Apparent Contradictions Between Science and Religion: Creation Is Only the Beginning Science Education for Diversity (pp. 329-338): Springer.
- Billingsley, B. (2000). Children's Images of Scientists: Stereotypes. In P. Fensham & R. Cross (Eds.), Science and the citizen for educators and the public (pp. 79-85). Melbourne: Melbourne: Arena