ABSTRACT
Metacognition, in its most basic form, is the activity of thinking about thinking. Because thinking is often taken to be a mental activity, largely a matter of manipulating internal representations, there has been little reason to look to the structure of the environment as a factor in thinking. From a distributed cognition perspective, all such strategies are interactive. The exam itself provides cues or prompts for metacognition. Questions are modular; they have a certain credit value. Cognitive efficiency and effectiveness are empirical measures of the goodness of a visual design. At a deeper level, however, what makes one design better than another for a particular task is that the better design has a better structured affordance landscape. Cue structure also includes the interactive components of an environment such as navigational cues, which are displayed by visual means but which also carry a meaning.
