This study was designed to validate the System for Observing Fitness Instruction Time (SOFIT5) and a modified SOFIT scale (SOFIT6) for assessing activity levels in physical education (PE) classes. Participants were 56 third- to fifth-grade students from a predominantly (98%) Hispanic school. Inter-rater reliability, using intraclass correlations, for both SOFIT5 and SOFIT5 was r = .98. The correlation for the SOFIT5 with TriTrac was r = .60 (CI = .43–.734) and the correlation for the SOFIT6 with TriTrac was r = .68 (CI = .524–.804). A six-point SOFIT scale may be more sensitive to measuring variations in light and moderate physical activity during PE classes as compared to the standard five point SOFIT scale. This has important implications for using this observation system to estimate the effects of interventions for physical activity during PE classes.

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