The new science behind guide2expertise.org was named praxomics in Dirlam’s (2017) Teachers, Learners, Modes of Practice: Theory and Methodology for Identifying Knowledge Development. New York: Routledge. That book detailed 50 years of research behind the measures and findings of this new science.

Praxomics provides a common way to scientifically study the development of all domains of expertise. A science is known by what it counts. Biology counts features of life that they call molecules, genes, cells, tissues, species, and ecosystems. Praxomics counts frequencies of expertise called steps, phases, goals, and domains.*

• Steps: Acquiring a new level of complexity on the way to expertise requires a process of discernment, examination, enabling, and performing. These steps were identified through analysis of 500 counseling sessions, coded for emphasis on a dozen different steps of transformative learning at Virginia Wesleyan University led by Director Bill Brown.

• Phases: We used five levels of complexity from beginning to inspiring. In Dirlam’s 1972 paper in Cognitive Psychology called “Most efficient chunk sizes”, there are mathematical proofs that the optimal number of chunks is two to four. Data from four studies with a thousand samples each of drawing, writing, developmental research, and music established the succession model: a set of mathematical equations that describe the developmental sequence of phases within any goal based on the learner’s opportunities to learn it, how common it was at the beginning of development, how easy it was to learn, and how motivated the learner was.

• Goals: A short explanation was always enough for experts to distinguish the five phases for any goal of their domains of expertise. But we often had to help them think about more than one or two goals. During our one-to-four-hour interviews of 350 experts in 100 domains, the number of goals identified in each interview ranged from 5 to 16..

• Domains: A field of expertise in any area of complex behavior that people have spent decades learning. Professional domains appear in many college catalogs, and researchers have published thousands or even millions of studies on them. Life domains can be just as rich, but there have been fewer research studies of them.

Sciences are also known by the generality, reliability, and usefulness of their counts and analyses.

• Generality: The results apply widely under many conditions and in many settings. The most general finding behind guide2expertise.org is an equation called the Succession model. Dirlam developed the model during his 1997-98 Cattell Fund Fellowship year at the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition of the University of California at San Diego. The model describes how often people used any phase for each goal of the four domains mentioned under phases. Four parameters show how those counts change over time: how common they were at the first measurement, how fast they grew in usage, how much they suppressed the other phases in the goal, and the ultimate steady usage after a long time period. It worked for all  the goals described in the thousand-sample studies mentioned above under Phases.

• Reliability: Different people in different settings can arrive at the same observations and conclusions.  Rating the presence or absence of phases is essential to counting them. Definitions and rater training in the four large studies resulted in 90% to 95% agreement between independent raters.

• Usefulness: Dozens of institutions and many hundreds of individuals have used the guide2expertise model to assess programs for accreditation, granting-agency reporting, program designing, and personal planning and development.

* The key terms were simplified from Dirlam (2017) as follows (with old terms in parentheses): Domain (Praxosystem), Goal (Dimension), Phase (Mode of Practice), and Step (Transformative Learning Commitment).