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Giving students the “pay off” (the contrived answers) and when to give that “pay-off” are concepts that are both relative. For it is important that lower levels of education (elementary school as well as introductory courses) include more “pay-off” in order to build the student’s initial repertoire of factual knowledge/common sense/problem solving skills/etc. But it is 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, ultimately giving less “answers.” In a lot of educational situations, we are doing a disservice to students if teachers act like god- all-knowing, when assuring students that their conclusion is “correct” and absolute answer. This leaves no room for change in the way one can look at a question or for different ways to answer the same question appropriately.

As the student reaches highschoool and higher levels of education, teachers (and less common but just as important, students) feedback should be meant to make the students aware of how close their understanding is to being less wrong and still revisable.