Author(s)

Nan Zhang ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ School of Nursing, Hainan Vocational University of Science and Technology, Haikou, 571137, China

Corresponding Author

Nan Zhang

ABSTRACT

Metacognition, the capacity to plan, monitor, regulate, and evaluate one's own thinking, is increasingly relevant to nursing education because safe practice requires students to recognise uncertainty, revise decisions, and learn from feedback. This scoping review mapped how metacognition has been conceptualised, assessed, associated with learning and practice outcomes, and cultivated in vocational nursing education. A structured targeted search identified evidence from higher vocational, associate-degree, diploma, practical-nursing, and comparable pre-licensure pathways, supplemented by nursing-education studies with directly transferable metacognitive mechanisms. The evidence consistently linked stronger metacognition with self-directed learning, critical thinking, problem solving, confidence in clinical decision-making, and patient-safety competence. Educational strategies with the clearest relevance were structured reflection and exam wrappers, simulation with guided debriefing, problem-based learning, virtual simulation, and scaffolded self-directed learning. However, direct vocational evidence remains geographically concentrated and dominated by cross-sectional and self-report designs. Vocational nursing programmes should therefore embed explicit planning, monitoring, regulation, and evaluation across theoretical courses, skills laboratories, simulation, and clinical placements, while assessment should capture error detection, strategy adjustment, help-seeking, and transfer to unfamiliar situations. Future studies should test whether metacognitive gains lead to observable improvements in clinical judgement, safe performance, licensure readiness, and transition to practice.

KEYWORDS

Metacognition; Vocational Nursing Education; Nursing Students; Self-Regulated Learning; Clinical Judgement; Simulation

CITE THIS PAPER

Nan Zhang. Metacognition within vocational nursing education: A scoping review. Adult and Higher Education (2026). Vol. 8, No. 2, 128-134. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/aduhe.2026.080215.

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