The role of teacher patience in the implementation of assessment for learning (AfL): Vignettes from a writing classroom

Assessment for learning (AfL) is broadly understood as the use of assessment information to promote students’ learning, with teachers communicating criteria and continually adjusting instruction to meet diverse student needs. While AfL’s benefits are documented across disciplines and contexts, it often requires sustained, iterative effort and does not yield immediate results, creating tensions when students struggle to meet expectations. Teacher patience—enduring delayed outcomes calmly and persevering despite challenges—may be crucial in sustaining AfL, yet it has been underexplored in classroom practice. This study addresses that gap by examining how teacher patience is involved in the process of AfL implementation over time in a Chinese university EFL writing class. The guiding research question is: How is teacher patience involved in the process of AfL? The study aims to highlight patience as a neglected but important factor in assessment practices and to inform teacher education.

Research on AfL shows that effective use of assessment information supports learning at multiple educational levels, with studied strategies including teacher-student dialogue, feedback, and peer assistance. Factors influencing AfL implementation include teachers’ professional knowledge, sociocultural and policy contexts, beliefs, and emotions. Studies report challenges such as inadequate communication of criteria and teacher beliefs misaligned with student-centered AfL. In EFL/ESL writing contexts, work has examined beliefs, emotions, and pedagogical knowledge, but not patience per se. Patience differs from adaptability by emphasizing calm endurance and perseverance amid setbacks. Although teacher patience has been noted tangentially in emotional accounts of assessment, it remains undertheorized and underexamined empirically in classroom assessment practice. This study positions teacher patience as a sociocognitive, context-sensitive construct potentially sustaining AfL and seeks to fill this research gap.

Design: Qualitative single case study to profile a phenomenon in context. Research site: A Chinese university English writing course on informative texts (exemplification, cause and effect, classification, compare/contrast). The department expected AfL (e.g., iterative feedback) but left specifics to the teacher, creating an authentic ecology for examining patience in practice. Participants: One teacher (pseudonym Corey), with ~3 years’ experience teaching writing; aligned with departmental AfL principles but aware of the patience challenges. Eighteen second-semester EFL university students, most with prior emphasis on accuracy and basic organization rather than meaning-making. AfL focus and assessment criteria: Two levels—(a) grammar (e.g., collocations, punctuation), and (b) meaning-making at three strata: ideational meaning (topic-related lexis, logical connectors), interpersonal meaning (tone/stance, reporting and hedging), and textual meaning (cohesion, conjunctions, lexical monitoring). Corey observed responses in class, provided iterative feedback, and reflected to tailor instruction. Data sources: (1) Teacher reflections written weekly for ~100 minutes (≈16 reflections, 1800–2500 words each) and researcher field notes on instructional and assessment practices; (2) each student’s four reflection papers (~300 words each) and records of essay drafts and revisions; (3) individual student interviews (~30 minutes) at semester end. Ethical approval obtained; informed consent secured. Analysis: Hybrid inductive and deductive thematic analysis. Texts (reflections, interviews) were repeatedly read and coded. Deductive codes, informed by the sociocognitive framework of teacher patience and prior literature, targeted indicators such as frustration, endurance, tolerance, perseverance, and adaptations. Inductive coding surfaced subcategories (e.g., occurrence/recurrence of patience, activation of patience, failures in assessment, AfL process). Codes were consolidated into categories around changing patience over time, interaction with student responses, and AfL complexity, culminating in themes. Themes were discussed with a colleague to reduce discrepancies.

• Patience emerged midway, triggered by disappointment: At the start, assessment practices were driven by professional responsibility rather than patience. Patience surfaced when repeated student failures to apply meaning-making (despite apparent in-class success) created a gap between expectations and performance, leading to teacher disappointment and a temptation to give up.
• Patience as power source: Once activated, patience sustained intensive, iterative feedback aligned with meaning-making, supported persistence across multiple feedback rounds, and enabled calm engagement with individual student issues. It motivated reflective adjustments (simplified language, more informative feedback, analysis of more samples), which led to improved performance by Essay 3 (fewer issues, better response to feedback).
• Contextual fluctuations and collapse/recovery: Patience waned after the teacher raised goals (introducing citations/referencing as interpersonal meaning). Students struggled with complexity and time constraints (midterms), underperforming relative to earlier levels. Combined with grading intensity and workload fatigue, patience reached a low point. The teacher’s professional identity helped reconstruct patience, but with reduced magnitude—patience became more passive, sustaining continued assessment without the prior level of passion.
• Overall: Teacher patience is dynamic and context-sensitive—activated by setbacks, strengthened by identity and past experience, eroded by heightened demands and fatigue, and reconstructed to passively sustain AfL when fully robust patience is depleted.

The findings show that teacher patience is a context-sensitive, emergent resource that sustains AfL when student performance lags and iterative adjustments are required. It addresses the research question by demonstrating when and how patience is activated, how it fuels intensive feedback and reflective refinement, and why it fluctuates with contextual pressures (raised expectations, student workload, teacher fatigue). This extends prior AfL research focused on strategies and enabling factors by foregrounding patience as a distinct construct from general teacher emotion or adaptability. The qualitative, context-rich approach was crucial to capture the nuanced trajectory of patience; a decontextualized quantitative approach might have missed it. The results underscore AfL’s complexity and caution against treating patience as the sole driver; rather, it interacts with responsibilities, beliefs, student context, and institutional demands. Practically, supporting and regulating patience, setting rational goals, and maintaining teacher-student communication are essential for sustainable AfL.

This study profiles teacher patience as a vital, dynamic sociocognitive construct in AfL implementation. Patience emerges as a sustaining force during setbacks, supports iterative feedback and reflective adjustments, and can wane under increased demands and fatigue, later recovering in a more passive form to maintain assessment continuity. Contributions include articulating the context-sensitive trajectory of patience in an EFL writing classroom and highlighting its neglected role in assessment practices. Implications call for patience development in teacher education, institutional support to mitigate contextual hindrances, and rational goal-setting with continuous communication. Future research should: (1) include more and diverse teachers and contexts; (2) extend the time span to trace long-term dynamics; (3) explore potential biological underpinnings and links to other sociocognitive constructs (e.g., happiness, self-determination, age); and (4) examine patience within broader pedagogical models to understand its role in teachers’ beliefs and dispositions toward assessment.

Single-teacher case study limits generalizability; findings stem from one EFL writing class within one semester. The time frame constrains observation of longer-term trajectories of patience. Future studies should involve multiple teachers across subjects and contexts, longer durations, and investigate potential genetic components and relationships with other sociocognitive and psychological constructs. Considering assessment within broader pedagogical models may reveal how patience integrates with teachers’ beliefs and dispositions.