Science education research on argumentation has increased over the last two decades. This review provides an overview of representative research on students' written argument in science education, and examines analytic frameworks that science educators use to assess the quality of scientific arguments constructed by students. Toulmin's argument pattern has substantially influenced science education research. We first considered Toulmin's argument pattern, and turned our attention to five representative researchers who presented concrete analytic frameworks for written arguments. We discussed the frameworks developed by Linn, Sandoval, McNeill & Krajcik, Kelly, and Zohar, and attempted to discover the common ground to these frameworks. We have organized this review around two issues that seem to be of critical importance to those who study the ways students generate arguments: (1) the structure or complexity of the argument (i.e., the components of an argument) and (2) the content of an argument (i.e., the accuracy or adequacy of the various components in the argument when evaluated from a scientific perspective). It is hoped that this review may contribute to future research on argument by providing a theoretical foundation.
