How to improve pre-service teachers’ argumentation skills has been receiving more and more attention from teacher educators. Visual cognitive tool refers to tools which users can learn with and creatively use to construct knowledge online. Current research revealed that it could help to improve learners’ higher-order thinking skills. This experimental study aimed to investigate the effect of two kinds of cognitive tools, the text-based online visual cognitive tool and the visual concept map, on improving the pre-service teachers’ skills on constructing and evaluating arguments. Post-test argumentation measurement scores and attitude questionnaire showed that the text-based cognitive tool was more effective than the concept map on improving pre-service teachers’ argumentation skills. However, the concept map was useful for externalizing the pre-service teachers’ thinking process as well as collaborative learning. This study also found that the pre-service teachers with teaching experience were inferior to the ones without any teaching experience in the ability on constructing arguments.

如何提高职前教师的论证能力越来越受到教师教育工作者的关注。视觉认知工具是指用户可以用来学习和创造性地在线构建知识的工具。目前的研究表明，它可以帮助提高学习者的高阶思维技能。本实验研究旨在探讨基于文本的在线视觉认知工具和视觉概念图两种认知工具对提高职前教师构建和评估论点技能的影响。测试后的辩论测量分数和态度问卷表明，基于文本的认知工具比概念图更有效地提高职前教师的辩论技巧。然而，概念图有助于外化职前教师的思维过程以及协作学习。本研究还发现，具有教学经验的职前教师在构建论据的能力上不如没有教学经验的教师。