Outcome-Based Education-Oriented Teaching Reform and Practice of the Educational Psychology Course: A Capability-Building Curriculum Reconstruction and Action Research

Abstract

This study adopts outcome-based education (OBE) as its guiding philosophy and reports an action research-based curriculum reconstruction of the Educational Psychology course at Guangdong University of Science and Technology. Grounded in Spady’s OBE principles and Biggs’s constructive alignment theory, the reform redesigns learning outcomes, reorganizes course modules around authentic teaching problems, embeds task-based learning as the core instructional mechanism, and establishes a multi-source evidence system to trace capability development. Data were collected from performance tasks, classroom observations, learning artifacts, and reflective memos across five instructional modules. The findings indicate three major outcomes: (1) Educational Psychology can be repositioned from a theory-oriented course to a psychological sense-making engine for interpreting instructional realities; (2) task design serves as the critical mechanism for activating and forming professional capabilities; and (3) multi-source evidence enables the visibility and traceability of teacher cognition development. The study demonstrates that OBE-based course reconstruction can reshape pre-service teachers’ cognitive structures and professional identity at an epistemic level, offering a replicable model for capability-oriented curriculum reform in teacher education.