During the piloting process I think it is fair to say that faculty saw the majority of their students generally improve to a significant degree in terms of the desired student outcomes. The course does not perform miracles, but in the opinion of the vast majority of those who have taught the course, it is well worth doing. There are some very gratifying teaching stories associated with this course, and the course is obviously very important, which is probably why so many faculty want to teach it again. Because Foundations is so different from courses students are familiar with, they are typically puzzled about its point. It often takes much of the semester for students to catch on.
Some students never do get it.
During those early weeks of the semester, it can be quite a struggle to reach out and try to grab the minds of the students. But from the perspective of the semester's end, things often look very different, and much more satisfying. We will be asking the fall Foundations faculty to reflect on the course, and make suggestions for changes, but we will wait to do that until after the semester is over, and they have had time to look back on the course as a whole. At the end of the term we will be doing a formal survey of student opinion about the course, and I certainly hope to try a survey of the same students a semester or two later on, as well. In the meantime, in the absence of hard data, people will tell you vastly different things about what the students and the faculty think about the course.