Translating policy into practice: teacher agency amid cognitive and ecological constraints in enacting competency-based assessment

The global shift toward competency-based education places unprecedented demands on frontline teachers to enact dynamic, process-oriented assessments. However, translating these top-down policy mandates into daily practice within resource-constrained classrooms remains a significant challenge. To unpack this implementation gap, this study employed an exploratory, embedded single-case study through a researcher-practitioner partnership (RPP). In a 5th-grade STEM unit, university researchers provided a theoretical assessment scaffold based on the SOLO taxonomy, while the frontline teacher co-designed and enacted the context-specific rubrics, offering a crucial bottom-up reality check. Findings reveal that while these tools successfully made abstract competencies visible and supported responsive instruction, their continuous enactment faced severe real-world constraints. Structurally, immense data-processing demands collided with rigid instructional time, forcing the teacher to engage in rational triage, sacrificing assessment documentation to preserve core teaching. Culturally, the evidence-based system clashed with entrenched grading habits and a traditional culture of correctness, triggering student mistrust of peer evaluation. Our analysis indicates that these implementation gaps are primarily driven not by a deficit in teacher assessment literacy, but by the interplay of severe structural and cultural constraints. Without systemic interventions to alleviate these operational and epistemic burdens, complex assessment innovations will inevitably be reduced to superficial survival checklists. This study thus highlights the indispensable role of boundary-crossing RPPs not as a magic bullet to resolve structural issues, but as a critical reality check that renders the teacher’s invisible labor and the severe ecological constraints explicitly visible to policymakers.