Reforming Chinese Higher Education Through Outcome-Based Education: A Conceptual Framework for Assessment Ecology, Faculty Development and Humanities Innovation

Abstract

Outcome-Based Education (OBE) has become a prominent reform language in Chinese higher education as universities are asked to demonstrate graduate capability, improve assessment evidence and renew undergraduate teaching. Yet implementation often remains documentary: programmes produce curriculum maps, attainment tables and audit reports without substantially changing assessment practice, faculty judgement or humanities curriculum design. Using an integrative conceptual synthesis of OBE theory, constructive alignment, programmatic assessment, feedback literacy, faculty development, new liberal arts research, AI-aware assessment and recent Chinese higher education policy, this article develops the OBE-CQIH framework: Outcome-Based Continuous Quality Improvement for Humanities-Inclusive Higher Education. The framework reframes OBE as a recursive ecology of policy-to-outcome translation, assessment-based evidence generation, faculty-led professional judgement and curriculum renewal. It shifts attention from outcome mapping to the institutional conditions under which learning evidence is generated, interpreted and used to revise curriculum. The article contributes to higher education reform literature by showing how humanities outcomes can be made visible without reducing interpretation, ethical reasoning or cultural judgement to thin indicators. It concludes with six research propositions, an implementation roadmap and operational indicators for future empirical studies in Chinese universities.