Teaching students to learn how to learn is a challenge for schools that intend to form autonomous people who are capable of taking decisions. These are essential aspects for health professionals who are permanently confronted with complex situations and a multiplicity of problems to be solved by professional actions. The desire for changes, which is explicit in educators' discourse, does not guarantee substantial changes in the form teaching is being developed. The question about how to promote these alterations still remains unanswered. Studies developed in the last two decades about cognition and metacognition seem to indicate a possible strategy to transform knowledge into relevant professional behavior, since it favors thinking about the thinking process as well as the development and control of mental abilities that are capable of maximizing the use of the individual potentialities necessary for a nurse to solve health problems.
learning; cognition; higher education; nursing