Connais-toi toi-même : une perspective globale de la métacognition

“Know thyself”. This famous statement, attributed to Socrates, has gone through the centuries. However, this capacity to know and regulate our cognitive activities, called metacognition, is receiving a growing and ongoing interest, notably because of its essential character for learning. To our knowledge, there is no complete and recent synthesis on metacognition, even less in French. This article aims at clarifying its conceptual framework by presenting what we know about its components, its functioning, its characteristics, and its development, according to the most recent scientific results. This theoretical insight reveals the daily importance of our ability to become aware of the cognitive processes involved in reaching optimal management. It leads us to discuss the perspectives applied to the field of education that result from it. We then address the relevance of metacognition in school learning in order to show that it constitutes an interesting approach to the problem of school failure. Based on the available knowledge about existing metacognitive programs, we discuss the need to implement such programs in francophone schools.