Five proprietary instruments
Praxis is the point where theory becomes action. These five instruments live there. Each one is grounded in established research and written for the working adults, online learners, leaders, and organizations who will actually answer the items.
All five are original work, authored solely by Dr. Corey R. Sims and proprietary to Sims Praxis, LLC. Each instrument’s development stage is stated plainly below, and nothing is described as validated before it is.
Organizational AI Readiness Scale
Most organizations assess AI readiness by asking whether leadership is enthusiastic. Enthusiasm is not capability. OAIRS measures the conditions that determine whether an adoption effort survives contact with staff who were never trained for it.
Two parallel versions share a common core and diverge on sector-specific items, so a county agency and a professional services firm are each measured against conditions that apply to them. Every subscale measures culture rather than capability, which is why a well-resourced organization can score low and a modest one can score high.
Program Participant Retention Risk Scale for Working Adults
Adult attrition is rarely about motivation. It is about a shift supervisor who will not move a schedule, a car that stopped working, or a household that treats the program as optional. Standard retention instruments were normed on residential undergraduates and do not ask about any of that.
PPRRS-WA measures nine conditions that precede departure, at intake and midpoint, producing a risk profile rather than a single score. That distinction matters operationally, because a participant high on situational barriers and a participant high on perceived relevance need entirely different responses.
Student Belonging and Institutional Identity Scale
Belonging instruments in higher education assume a campus. They ask about residence halls, student organizations, and running into faculty between classes. None of that describes an adult learner taking courses at eleven at night after their children are asleep.
SBIIS measures belonging and institutional identity for learners whose entire relationship with the institution is mediated through a screen, including how they explain setbacks to themselves. Attribution of negative experiences is frequently the strongest signal in the profile.
Leader Cognitive Empathy Profile
Most empathy measures capture how much a leader cares, and none of them ask about difference. LCEP measures how consistently a leader engages in perspective-taking with people whose race, gender, generation, or economic background differs from their own. Caring broadly and practicing deliberately across difference are not the same thing.
Seven dimensions cover identity-differentiated perspective-taking practice across racial, gender, generational, and socioeconomic difference, alongside the effort a leader invests, their awareness of in-group favoritism, and their ability to interrupt a snap judgment before acting on it. Embedded discriminant and social desirability items make the profile harder to game.
Pre-Acquisition Cultural Compatibility Index
Deals are diligenced on financials and rarely on how two organizations actually make decisions. Then the acquired team discovers that what took a conversation now takes an approval chain, and the people the buyer paid for begin leaving within the year.
PACCI has both organizations complete identical items before close. Each dimension is anchored to a descriptive pole, so a score locates an organization rather than grading it. The output is not a score for either party but a gap map showing exactly where they diverge, which turns integration risk into something that can be planned for rather than discovered.
Content validity
Before any data is collected, each instrument carries a documented derivation running theory to construct to dimension to item. An item that cannot be traced upward through all four steps does not belong in the pool. That rule is what reduced the pools during development.
Why this is written before validation rather than after. Evidence based on test content is one of five sources of validity evidence recognized in the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. It is also the only source that can be established before any data exists.
It does its work later. When factor analysis returns a structure, a documented derivation is what makes the result interpretable. A structure that matches the derivation is confirmation. A structure that does not is a finding about the construct, traceable to a specific dimension and a specific theoretical claim. Without a specification written in advance, the second outcome is indistinguishable from a mistake.
Research status
Development stage is disclosed in every proposal, every agreement, and every report. This is the current picture.
Send the population, the decision the data has to support, and the timeline. If none of these is the right tool for your question, we will tell you that.
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