Student evaluations of teaching have considerable impact on teaching improvement. However, there is no reliable instrument that can reflect nursing students' perspectives of teaching evaluations in China. To design a student-centred evaluation instrument of nursing teaching in China, we developed and psychometrically tested the Nursing Course Experience Questionnaire (NCEQ). A literature review, student focus group interviews, student group discussion, Delphi survey, and a pilot test were used to confirm the content of the questionnaire. The data from 581 nursing students were randomly divided into sample A (n = 283) for exploratory factor analysis and sample B (n = 298) for confirmatory factor analysis and questionnaire reliability assessment. The final version of the NCEQ included 31 items and 6 sub-scales. The Cronbach's [alpha] was 0.968 for the whole questionnaire and >0.751 for the sub-scales, which indicated that the NCEQ was an effective instrument that can be employed to evaluate nursing students' perspectives on teaching in China.