The philosophy of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) was proposed by the American scholar Spady in 1981, and its core lies in taking the final learning outcomes as the starting point to reverse-design teaching activities and evaluation systems [3]. This philosophy emphasizes that the entire educational process revolves around expected outcomes and is continuously improved based on feedback. OBE follows the principle of reverse design, at the macro level, it determines cultivation goals, graduation requirements, and curriculum systems based on internal and external needs; at the micro level, it designs specific course objectives, teaching content, and teaching methods based on graduation requirements, and establishes an evaluation mechanism oriented toward outcome achievement. This complete chain, from macro needs to micro teaching activities, constitutes the output-oriented main line of OBE. On this basis, by clarifying the supporting relationship of course objectives to graduation requirements and establishing a quantitative evaluation path from course objective achievement to graduation requirement achievement, the evaluation bottom line of OBE is formed. Combining the main line and the bottom line, OBE constructs a logically clear and traceable teaching quality evaluation framework, providing a methodological path for systemic and continuous teaching design and quality assurance [4]. Qin et al. [5] constructed an ideological and political teaching model for the Gerontological Nursing course based on the OBE philosophy. Guided by learning outcomes, this model effectively promoted the cultivation of students’ professional skills, professional ethics, and social responsibility. However, an excessive focus on expected outcomes within the OBE framework may lead to a utilitarian teaching process, thereby undermining the effectiveness of ideological and political education. Therefore, when developing an evaluation index system for ideological and political education in nursing courses based on OBE, it is crucial to avoid the pitfall of index-only-ism.

The Tyler Rationale was proposed in the 1940s by Ralph Tyler, who is known as the “father of curriculum evaluation”, and it is regarded as the first systematic theoretical model in the field of educational evaluation. This model takes educational goals as the core and emphasizes transforming educational goals into specific, observable, and measurable behavioral objectives [6]. Its theoretical framework is constructed around four questions that must be answered during the preparation of curricula and educational plans: 1) What educational purposes should the school seek to attain? 2) What educational experiences can be provided that are likely to attain these purposes? 3) How can these educational experiences be effectively organized? 4) How can we determine whether these purposes are being attained? Correspondingly, the Tyler’s Model systematizes the evaluation process into four steps: determining evaluation objectives, determining evaluation situations, designing evaluation instruments, and utilizing evaluation results. Liu et al. [7] constructed a teaching evaluation index system for ideological and political education in the undergraduate Surgical Nursing course based on the Tyler Model. However, the emphasis of this model on the operationalization of goals has limitations; for example, complex and implicit qualities such as aesthetic ability are difficult to fully transform into explicit behavioral indicators that can be directly observed [8].

The CIPP evaluation model is a classic educational evaluation model proposed by the famous American scholar Daniel Leroy Stufflebeam. This model emphasizes conducting evaluations of educational activities across four dimensions: Context Evaluation, which involves analyzing the educational environment, clarifying educational needs, and assessing the impact brought by the educational setting; Input Evaluation, which assesses the resources and conditions required to achieve objectives to ensure their feasibility; Process Evaluation, which focuses on examining the performance of both teachers and students, as well as whether teachers conduct continuous supervision, inspection, and feedback during the implementation process to dynamically adjust and improve the plan; and Product Evaluation, which is a comprehensive evaluation of the outcomes, effectiveness, and influence of the plan’s implementation, serving as a basis for deciding whether objectives should be continued, adjusted, or optimized [9]. This model is characterized by feedback and improvement, emphasizing the whole-process and systemic nature of evaluation, which provides an ideal theoretical framework for the comprehensive scrutiny and optimization of Curriculum Ideological and Political Education teaching activities and holds important reference significance for the evaluation of Curriculum Ideological and Political Education in higher education institutions. Zhang et al. [10] constructed an evaluation index system for ideological and political education in the Nursing Scientific Research course based on the CIPP evaluation model, which systematically and comprehensively reflects the overall state of curriculum-based ideological and political teaching. However, index systems developed through this model are often extensive and complex. In practical applications, the heavy burden of data collection and the intricacy of operational procedures may present certain challenges to its widespread promotion and implementation.

Based on this, the three theoretical frameworks of OBE, Tyler and CIPP have their respective emphases in the evaluation of ideological and political education in nursing professional courses and are applicable to different scenarios. The OBE philosophy is outcome-oriented and suitable for curriculum evaluation closely linked to professional accreditation and graduation requirements. The Tyler model focuses on the decomposition and behavioral measurement of specific teaching objectives, and is applicable to the assessment of observable ideological and political teaching effects in a single course or specific teaching links. The CIPP model provides a holistic and process-oriented evaluation perspective, attaches importance to the investigation of educational environment, resource input and implementation process, and is more suitable for the comprehensive and continuous long-term evaluation of curriculum ideological and political education reform projects or the education system at the professional level. In the actual construction of the evaluation index system, the applicable theoretical framework can be selected according to the evaluation objectives, resource conditions and research priorities.

General quality indices are the fundamental components of the Curriculum Ideological and Political Education evaluation system and are applicable to all specialties, their core lies in manifesting Socialist Core Values and basic civic moral standards. In the evaluation of Curriculum Ideological and Political Education for nursing professional courses, these indices play a key role in laying the value foundation and ensuring the correctness of the educational direction. Yin et al. [11], in constructing an ideological and political evaluation index system for professional degree nursing postgraduates, explicitly proposed to “take love for the Party, the country, socialism, the people, and the collective as the main line, with the comprehensive improvement of the quality of nursing professional talent cultivation as the core point.” Wang et al. [12], when constructing the evaluation index system for the Health Assessment course, established “feelings of home and country” as a primary evaluation indicator. The evaluation of general quality indices must focus on integration with nursing professional scenarios to ensure that the value-leading function is implemented effectively and to avoid regressing into formalized macro-expressions.

Nursing professional trait indices are the key distinction between Curriculum Ideological and Political Education evaluation in nursing and other specialties; their design must be rooted in the core attributes of the nursing discipline, aiming to transform universal values into specific, observable professional qualities and capabilities closely linked to clinical practice. The evaluation in this dimension focuses on core elements in nursing practice such as humanistic care, professional identity, and ethical decision-making, and strives to observe these through situational and behavioral indices. For instance, Ma et al. [13] proposed that the evaluation indicators for Curriculum Ideological and Political Education teaching in undergraduate nursing professional courses should highlight the organic integration of ideological and political elements with professional knowledge, so as to promote the training and improvement of students’ comprehensive abilities. Huang et al. [14] emphasized in the evaluation indicators that ideological and political elements such as nurses’ professional literacy and humanistic nursing should be integrated into the professional teaching content. All these studies reflect that the indicators of nursing professional traits should be constructed around the core values of nursing major, and internalize ideological and political education into students’ professional competence and behavioral consciousness.

The effectiveness of Curriculum Ideological and Political Education evaluation depends on its compatibility with specific curriculum content and teaching forms. The evaluation indicators of theoretical courses focus on examining the integration depth of ideological and political elements with professional knowledge, as well as their guiding effect on students’ value cognition. For example, in military academy nursing professional courses, the evaluation indicators clearly require the inclusion of contents related to “military and political literacy”, aiming to investigate whether students have formed an in-depth understanding of the responsibilities and missions of military nursing staff [14]. By contrast, the evaluation indicators of practical courses pay more attention to whether students’ values can be effectively externalized into specific and observable professional behaviors in simulated and real clinical situations. For instance, relevant studies have proposed specific evaluation contents targeting practical scenarios and objects when constructing Curriculum Ideological and Political Education evaluation indicators, such as “cultivating the awareness of forming a team with patients, families, doctors and other personnel to coordinate and cooperate with each other and promote the overall development of the team” [12] and “caring for women, infants and young children” [15]. Such indicators are usually combined with professional skill assessments to realize the comprehensive evaluation of students’ knowledge, skills and literacy.

Future research should strive to construct a long-term evaluation mechanism covering the whole process of on-campus teaching and clinical internship, so as to realize continuous collaborative education between colleges and clinical institutions. In the clinical internship stage, clinical preceptors and head nurses should serve as the main evaluation subjects. The evaluation should focus on students’ observable professional behaviors in workplace scenarios, such as whether they can take the initiative to care for patients and respect patient autonomy, whether they demonstrate a sense of responsibility and willingness to communicate in team collaboration, whether they exhibit basic ethical thinking and behavioral decision-making when facing ethical dilemmas, and whether they can remain calm and abide by operational norms in emergency situations. To enhance operability, colleges and hospitals should jointly formulate unified evaluation scales and adopt information platforms to realize real-time sharing of evaluation data. College teachers can regularly review clinical evaluation records, and form a continuous developmental profile of students’ ideological and political literacy combined with the achievement of on-campus curriculum objectives, thereby achieving effective connection between college and clinical evaluation [20][21].

The core task of future evaluation systems lies in constructing characteristic evaluation indices rooted in the essence of the nursing discipline. This requires developing behavioral indices with depth and distinctiveness by centering on core nursing values such as care, respect, responsibility, and cooperation, combined with the characteristics of different specialized nursing areas [20]. For example, the maintenance of autonomy and dignity can be highlighted in geriatric nursing, while calm responsibility and a spirit of teamwork should be emphasized in acute and critical care nursing. By designing complex cases close to clinical reality, students can be guided to conduct ethical reasoning, value weighing, and professional reflection, thereby assessing their ethical sensitivity and the process of professional identity construction. Furthermore, it is necessary to actively explore the introduction of a patient-centered evaluation perspective; under the premise of following ethical norms and protecting patient privacy, attempts should be made to collect feedback on patient experiences through questionnaires or interviews, using this as a key reference to verify whether the educational effectiveness of Curriculum Ideological and Political Education has truly been transformed into clinical caring behaviors.

The effective operation of the future evaluation system is inseparable from the empowerment of information technology. Efforts should be made to develop an integrated digital evaluation platform to integrate functions such as evaluation standards, multi-subject online evaluation, data aggregation, and the generation of visualized reports, thereby lowering the threshold for use and achieving the convenient implementation of evaluation activities and standardized management of data. On this basis, implicit evaluation can be further explored; for example, analyzing students’ online discussions, resource learning, and reflection texts to provide continuous and implicit process-oriented feedback for teaching. Ultimately, by utilizing the whole-process and multi-dimensional data gathered by the platform for learning analysis, teachers can be driven to conduct precise teaching interventions and strategy adjustments, truly connecting the complete closed loop of evaluation, feedback, and improvement, and making evaluation a smart engine for the continuous enhancement of educational quality [1].