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“Science for kids is like buried treasure….sometimes forgotten.” ME

Giving students the “pay off” (the contrived answers) and when to give that “pay-off” are both relative. Lower levels of education (elementary school as well as introductory courses) need to include more “pay-off” to build the student’s initial repertoire of factual knowledge/common sense/problem solving skills/etc. It’s crucial to pull out the scaffolding at the right time, which has to be at an early time.
So as students get older, the “pay-off” can be more philosophical, more open-ended, and give less “answers.” In a lot of educational situations, we are doing a disservice to students if we act like “god” and assure them that their conclusion is “correct” when providing them an absolute answer. Teachers (and less common but just as important, students) feedback is meant to make the students aware of how close their understanding is to being less wrong and still revisable.