That is unfortunate. I think my teachers would have accepted something along the lines of "Here are some reasons I thought of; I don't think any of these reasons are very good, though, so I actually don't know what happened."

Maybe a teacher could introduce an experiment where the students have been taught a "lies-to-children" model that doesn't quite work in the experiment, then have them do the experiment, and then after some agony on the students' part, explain that the results were because the model is actually wrong and now they need to learn a newer one. As a sort of live-action science retelling. Still a little bit cargo-culty because there is still an answer at the end of the tunnel, but might give them a better idea of how things are supposed to work.