Researchers disagree on how much guidance novice learners need. One line of research holds that minimally guided discovery approaches are less effective for novices than explicit teaching with worked examples, citing cognitive-load evidence; another finds well-designed guided inquiry can still be beneficial, arguing scaffolding quality and task design matter more than the direct-instruction-versus-discovery label itself.
What would resolve this Comparative studies that isolate the amount and quality of instructional scaffolding, rather than only labelling a method direct instruction or discovery learning, would show whether the disagreement is about guidance itself or about how well each approach is implemented.
OpenEducational psychology and instructional designStructural Learning, Pedagogy Explained