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In current educational research, there is an increasing acceptance among researchers to emphasize that students must be educated on scientific ways of thinking. Simultaneously, science education practice has focused on the development of scientific thinking skills which are associated with scientific inquiry rather than memorization skills. When it comes to scientific practices, educational reforms highly emphasize scientific practices such as argumentation in science education. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to conduct a synthesis study on argumentation in science education. In order to achieve this purpose, this topic will be reviewed under seven main headings within the current study. These are development of argumentation theory, argumentation approaches, argumentation models used in science education, student's role in argumentation, teacher's role in argumentation, activities that create an argumentation environment, difficulties associated with the implementation of the argumentation in the learning environment and scientific argumentation respectively. In addition, some sub-headings will follow the main headings.

The aim of this study is to evaluate the scientific reasoning skills of middle school 7th grade students in science course. The study group consists of 60 7th grade students (35 females and 25 males) in a public school in the city center of Ankara. The research data were collected with seven questions, developed and applied once to the students by the researcher. The first five of these were two-stage questions and the last two were one-stage questions. According to the written answers of the students to these questions, a scoring rubric consisting of Level 0, Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 was developed by the researcher. After the rubric was developed by the researcher, the data were analyzed using descriptive analysis method. The findings of the study show that the reasoning performance of each 7th grade middle school student in the answers to the first two-stage five questions is considerably low ("Level 0"). It is thought that the results of this study may contribute to the studies of researchers, who are interested in argumentation and scientific reasoning skills in science education.

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