Hurford 1994.

Methods	Randomised controlled trial (most likely) 1 intervention group (phonics + phoneme awareness) and 1 control group (untrained)
Participants	Location/setting: mostly middle‐class US elementary schools Criteria: standard score < 91 on the Word Attack test of the WRMT‐R; standard score < 91 on the Word Identification subtests of the WRMT‐R Recruits: children identified as at risk for RD with normal IQ or at risk for becoming poor readers with low IQ (GV poor readers) Sex: 48 male; 51 female Mean age: 80.35 months (SD and range not reported) Ethnicity: 92.8% white, 6% African‐American, 5% Hispanic, and 7% Asian‐American Sample size: 99 children Allocation: Half of the RDs and half of the GVs were included in the training group and the other half comprised the control groups. So, there were four groups (RD trained, GV trained, RD control and GV control). Group membership was determined by matching the students at risk for RD on the variables outlined in the method section and then RANDOMLY assigning them to either the T (treatment) or C (control) group. Statistical analysis was performed to determine that the T and C groups were equivalent" (quote from personal communication via email). Since this review did not use IQ as an exclusionary criteria, we merged the 2 trained groups (RD and GC) to form the intervention group, and merged the 2 untrained groups (RD and GV) to form the control group. Intervention group: n = 49; mean = 25 (see notes below); 25 females and 24 males; mean age 79.8 months (SD and range not reported) Control group: n = 50; mean = 25 (see notes below); 26 females and 24 males; mean age 80.9 months (SD and range not reported)
Interventions	Intervention: intrasyllable discrimination training, phonemic blending and phonemic segmentation with letters. The training sequence was the same for each participant. Control: no training Procedure: intervention was one‐to‐one, 15–20 minutes/session. Approximately 40 sessions – twice/week for approximately 20 weeks by computer and trainer
Outcomes	Time of post‐test: < 1 month after training completed Primary outcomes: non‐word reading accuracy (WJRMT‐R: Word Attack subtest) and regular and irregular word reading accuracy (WJRMT‐R: Word Identification subtest)
Notes	Study also included 332 children without reading difficulties, which we excluded as they did not meet the criteria for inclusion. Dropouts for 486 participants initially screened: 55 (13.3%), "this loss in the participant pool due to attrition (13.3%) is similar to the attrition rate these school systems typically experience" (quote, p 649). We used the Word Attack and Word Identification measures from the WRMT‐R. Since we are including all poor readers regardless of IQ, we took the mean of the 2 untrained groups (RD and GV) for control data and the 2 trained groups (RD and GV) for experimental data. We also used the mean n for these groups, which was 25 in each case. Contacted Hurford (20 September 2011) for means and SDs for primary outcomes (discrimination, segmentation, Word Identification and Word Attack measures) at pre‐ and post‐test (supplied). Study start and end dates: not reported Funding: not reported Potential/declared conflicts of interest: none reported
Risk of bias
Bias	Authors' judgement	Support for judgement
Random sequence generation (selection bias)	Low risk	Quote from personal communication: "Group membership was determined by matching the students at risk for RD on the variables outlined in the method section and then RANDOMLY assigning them to either the T [treatment] or C [control] group."
Allocation concealment (selection bias)	Low risk	Comment: could not foresee assignment due to central allocation of participants to groups.
Blinding of participants and personnel (performance bias) All outcomes	Unclear risk	Comment: no information provided; however, participants were children with little understanding of reading treatment techniques and hence were unlikely to understand allocation.
Blinding of outcome assessment (detection bias) All outcomes	Low risk	Personal communication: testing was done by someone who did not know the students.
Incomplete outcome data (attrition bias) All outcomes	Low risk	Quote from publication: "three groups lost approximately same percentage [13.3%] of participants" (p 649). Comment: all groups experienced the same (relatively low) dropout rate.
Selective reporting (reporting bias)	Unclear risk	Comment: data reported for all reading tests listed in methods; adequate detail for data to be included in analysis.
Other bias	Low risk	Comment: none apparent