Activity Context

Activity context lets you record what instructional activity is happening during an observation session. When you switch activities — from large group instruction to independent work, for example — sight·line marks the transition with a timestamp. At the end of the session, you can see behavior rates broken down by activity type rather than as a single aggregate.

This is useful when a referral question involves setting or activity specificity: “Is the disruption worse during transitions?” “Does the student stay on task during small group but not independent work?”

Enabling activity context

On the Setup screen, turn on Activity tracking before starting the session. The activity bar will appear at the top of the recording screen once recording begins.

Recording activity transitions

During recording, the activity bar shows six options:

Activity	Keyboard shortcut
Large group instruction	Shift+1
Small group work	Shift+2
Independent work	Shift+3
Unstructured time	Shift+4
Transition	Shift+5
Other	Shift+6

Tap a pill or press the shortcut to switch to that activity. The transition is timestamped automatically — no need to pause the session. Tap the active pill again to clear it (no activity set).

Transition: Use this for the gap between two other activities — lining up, putting away materials, moving between rooms. Many referral questions hinge on what happens during these unstructured moments, and tagging them explicitly lets the activity breakdown surface transition-specific behavior rates.

Other: Selecting “Other” opens a popover picker. You can pick a label you’ve already used earlier in the same session, pick one of the recent labels saved for this student, or type a new one. Each distinct “Other” label becomes its own segment — so “Morning meeting” followed later by “Snack” produces two intervals in the activity log rather than collapsing into one. Recent labels persist per student so repeat observations don’t require re-typing.

Activity switches do not interrupt scoring. Behavior keys remain active and the timer keeps running.

Viewing results by activity

On the Results screen, a section labeled Activity breakdown shows behavior rates for each activity type that occurred during the session. If the student was in large group instruction for 12 minutes and independent work for 8 minutes, you’ll see separate rate calculations for each.

Activity periods are also visualized as color-coded bands on the interval raster (for interval recording methods), so you can see at a glance which behaviors clustered within which activity phases.

Comparing activity context across sessions

The Session Comparison screen includes an Activity-level comparison section when multiple sessions have activity context recorded. This shows whether behavior rates in a given activity type are stable or shifting across the assessment period.

Example: if independent work consistently shows 3x the off-task rate of large group instruction across four sessions, that’s a pattern worth naming explicitly in the FBA or evaluation report. The activity comparison view makes that visible without manually calculating it.

Activity context in exports

Activity periods appear in PDF exports as labeled bands on session charts. CSV exports include an activity_type column so you can filter and analyze by activity in external tools.