Persistence and academic resilience – how learning happens

For many years we have often talked about persistence and resilience as if they are personal qualities students either have or do not have. We encourage children to ‘keep going’ and to ‘bounce back’, sometimes with the quiet implication that effort is a matter of character. Recent research provides a nuance to this understanding which is more useful for teachers and more hopeful for students.

A major systematic review published at the end of last year (Sparks et al, 2025) synthesised findings from 74 studies on persistence and academic resilience across K–12 education. Its conclusion is clear: persistence and resilience are not fixed personality traits. Rather, they are part of the learning process – shaped by task design, classroom conditions, and how teachers respond when students struggle.

From the studies reviewed, a shared definition of persistence is proposed: sustained effort toward completing a goal-directed task despite difficulty. Importantly, persistence only exists when there is a clear task, genuine challenge, sustained effort and eventual completion. 

This matters, because it shifts the focus away from student willpower and onto learning design. If tasks are too easy and students stay in the familiar and routine, then there is nothing to persist through. If tasks are overwhelming or poorly designed, persistence collapses into avoidance. Productive persistence emerges when challenge is deliberate and support is well timed.

This definition aligns closely with findings from cognitive science. Learning – especially early reading, mathematics, and complex problem-solving – is effortful before it becomes fluent. Along the way, students must work through a lack of certainty, slow progress, and repeated errors long enough for understanding and automaticity to develop. 

When students disengage early, instruction cannot do its work, no matter how well it is executed. Persistence is what keeps learners in the cognitive task long enough for learning to take hold.

So, when students struggle, is something going wrong, or is something important happening?

Research on productive struggle helps explain why grapple in learning is not only normal but can be necessary. Students who are required to think hard, make mistakes, and work through uncertainty tend to develop deeper understanding and longer-lasting learning than those who experience only smooth success. 

As Professor Dylan Wiliam reminds us, ‘doing things in unfamiliar ways leads to learning that is deeper, better connected to existing learning and therefore remembered for longer’ (South Australian Department for Education, n.d.).

To support this process, evidence-informed instructional approaches such as productive failure, erroneous examples, and affect-aware feedback are useful. Affect-aware feedback responds not just to a student’s performance, but to how they are feeling in the moment, adjusting feedback to reduce frustration, counter boredom, and sustain productive engagement. 

These approaches do not remove difficulty; they contain it. Students experience challenge within structures that prevent collapse, allowing effort to be sustained rather than abandoned.

If persistence operates during difficulty, academic resilience operates after it. The systematic review defines resilience as: the process of adapting and re-engaging following setbacks, stress, or failure in order to achieve learning success over time.

This distinction is important, because learning is rarely linear. Students who learn well are not those who never struggle, but those who recover productively when they do. A student may persist for a while, fail, and disengage permanently: persistence without resilience. Another may falter, adjust, and return: resilience at work.

There is a clear message from the research cited in the review – students are more likely to recover from errors when mistakes are treated as information rather than judgement, and when teachers respond calmly and strategically rather than urgently. Over time, these experiences shape students’ expectations about learning itself: that the grapple is temporary, manageable, and worth working through.

One of the most powerful findings in the review is that persistence and resilience are context-dependent. They are shaped by how safe, structured, and supportive students perceive their learning environment to be. 

Of course, it is the student’s perception of the environment, not anyone else’s. Students are more likely to sustain effort and recover from setbacks when tasks are challenging but achievable, expectations are clear, feedback focuses on strategies rather than speed or ability, and teachers respond to struggle without signalling alarm. 

This helps explain why persistence is a good predictor of achievement. It can be less about students’ intrinsic motivation and more about whether learning environments are designed for students to remain cognitively engaged when learning becomes demanding.

The implication for teaching is simple but profound. We cannot improve learning outcomes without designing for persistence and resilience. Persistence is built through tasks that require sustained effort. Resilience is built through how teachers respond to error and setback. Both can be shaped to improve students’ outcomes.

Getting the level of difficulty right depends less on formulas and more on teachers’ professional judgement, developed through collegial conversations that help fine tune tasks and the learning experience of each child.

As educator Dan Meyer expressed it, there is a risk that without designing for persistence and resilience, we might find ourselves ‘paving a smooth, straight path from [challenge to solution] and congratulating our students for how well they can step over the small cracks in the way.’ 

When classrooms are designed to support students through the right level of difficulty rather than to find ways around it, learning becomes deeper, more durable, and more equitable.

References
Meyer, D. (2010, March). Math class needs a makeover [Video]. TED Conferences. https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_class_needs_a_makeover

South Australian Department for Education. (n.d.). Dylan Wiliam in SA. AC Leaders Resource.

Sparks, J. R., Lehman, B., Gladstone, J. R., Zhang, S., Schroeder, N. L., & Israel, M. (2025). Measuring persistence and academic resilience of K−12 students: systematic review and operational definitions. Frontiers in Education, 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2025.1673500