Perseverance is the key to success – but taking a break can prove just as productive as pressing on, according to new research.

Research has found that children who are not deterred by failing at a task do better than those who opt to stay in their comfort zone.

But the research from Linköping and Lund universities in Sweden also discovered that children who, when faced with failure, take a break before continuing with their task do just as well as those who plough on without pause.

This is despite the fact that children who pause spend less time on the task than those who carry on.

Academics used a digital history game to assess how perseverance affected pupils’ performance, according to the study report being presented at today's London Festival of Learning at UCL Institute of Education.

In the game, children aged 10-12 were given tasks that got progressively harder – ensuring that eventually they would fail.

When the children did fail, they were given five choices: to continue on the same mission, to have a less difficult mission, to have another on the same level, to have a more difficult mission or to take a break to play another game before continuing.

The power of perseverance

The “high perseverance” children who usually chose to continue with the same mission – even if they did so after a short break – were found to complete more tasks at a higher level than those who were more prone to trying something else.

And those "high perseverance" children who took a break before continuing seemed to do as well as those who pressed on without taking any time out.

The researchers said this could be due to children being able to focus better after a break.

“All of us at some point will find ourselves in a situation where we need to persevere in order to master a novel or difficult task,” researcher Agneta Gulz, of Lund University, will say today.

“And while perseverance doesn’t guarantee success, giving up certainly guarantees failure,” she will add.

All the students were asked how much they had learned during the session and how enjoyable they found it. Contrary to expectations, the research found no difference between the students who persevered and those who did not.

The high-perseverance students did not say they felt they had learned more than those who were more likely to give up.

“This might be explained in terms of high-perseverance students usually persevering and thus being more used to working on more challenging material and being more motivated to do so,” the research paper states.

The findings complement research which shows that people with a "growth mindset" – the belief that intelligence can be improved through effort as opposed to a feeling that one’s abilities are fixed – are more successful at school.

And the researchers say the findings could be used to help build educational software which nudges children into persevering – to help bolster the less persistent students’ efforts and enable them to learn better.