Evaluating Instructional Quality in Value-Oriented Higher Education Courses: Hierarchical Measurement and Invariance Evidence From One Chinese Provincial Context

Student evaluations are used in Chinese higher education as one component of broader teaching-quality monitoring, but the same scores may be asked to support improvement, reporting, and comparison. This study examined the measurement structure of a 10-item evaluation instrument for ideological and political education courses, treated as a locally specific case within the broader family of value-oriented courses. Data combined a de-identified institutional survey collected in 2025 and an anonymous multi-institutional survey collected in 2026, yielding 2,133 responses from one Chinese provincial context. Competing ordinal confirmatory factor models were estimated with WLSMV. Cross-institutional invariance was tested in three sufficiently large institutions (N = 1,882), with supplementary source-specific, gender, balanced-sample, uncollapsed-score, and bifactor analyses. The one-factor and two-factor models fit inadequately, whereas a correlated three-factor model fit better. A statistically equivalent second-order parameterization was retained for theoretical and reporting purposes, not because it fit better. The domains were Value-Oriented Learning Gains, Theory and Value Orientation, and Interactive and Experiential Teaching. Configural, metric, and scalar invariance was supported across the three main institutions. However, strong ceiling effects, a dominant general factor, limited residual specificity for two domains, and boundary-level overlap between Theory and Value Orientation and Interactive and Experiential Teaching restrict strong standalone subscale interpretation. The instrument therefore provides a broad instructional-quality signal and related descriptive domains within the sampled context. It may support local improvement and cautious comparison when measurement invariance is established, but it should not be used for national generalization, fine-grained ranking, or claims about students’ actual values.