This special issue introduction specifies several rationales for its focus on the relationship between teaching practice and student learning. Worldwide teaching reforms show some converging policy patterns with shared assumptions around the role of teaching practices in shaping students’ learning outcomes as their bases. These assumptions and policy patterns are seriously challenged by various countering arguments and critiques. Such a contentious situation demands extensive and solid empirical knowledge for its productive resolution at a conceptual level and for guiding the development of the relevant teaching reforms in different countries. However, such knowledge is not available readily in the exiting literature, which is fragmented and limited, with few studies based on large databases from a comparative perspective involving non-Western countries and regions. It goes on to introduce four studies in the special issue that use international databases and comparative analyses involving different countries/regions and highlights their contributions to the much-needed empirical knowledge. Finally, it calls for further and more extensive research along this line of empirical exploration.