Lovett 2000.

Methods	Randomised controlled trial 2 intervention programmes (phonics + phoneme awareness, word identification (not relevant)) and a control (alternative training)
Participants	Location/setting: children referred to the Clinical Unit at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada Criteria: score < 25th percentile on 4 out of 5 reading tests (WRAT‐3: Reading; WRMT‐R: Word Identification; WRMT‐R: Word Attack; Peabody Individual Achievement Test ‐ Revised: Reading Recognition; GFW Sound‐symbol Tests: Reading of Symbols); WISC‐R Verbal and Performance IQ ≥ 85; no English as second language, extreme hyperactivity, hearing impairment, brain damage, a chronic medical condition or serious emotional disturbance, attention deficits; aged 7–13 years Recruits: 166 reading disabled children. Mean IQ on WISC‐3 or WISC‐R: Verbal IQ M 92, SD 13.7, Performance IQ M 98.7, SD 14.3. On average, sample > 2 SD below age‐norm expectations at referral, with half of the children consistently below the first percentile for age on standardised achievement measures. Of these 166, 84.3% of the sample (140 participants) could be classified into 1 of 3 subgroups: 54.3% double deficit, 22.1% phonological deficit, 23.6% visual naming‐speed deficit. Sex: 113 males; 53 females Mean age: 9.9 (SD 1.6 years; range 7–13 years) Ethnicity: not reported Sample size: 88 reading disabled children Allocation: 140 children randomly assigned to 1 of 3 treatments: PhAB training; WIST Program (not relevant to this review); and CSS (controls). In this review, the PhAB trainees were the intervention group and the CSS were the control group. Intervention groups: phonics + phoneme awareness: n = 51 (sex, mean age, SD, and range not reported) word identification: n = 52 (sex, mean age, SD, and range not reported) Control group: n = 37 (sex, mean age, SD, range not reported)
Interventions	Interventions: phonics + phoneme awareness: PhAB skills were trained with oral and written presentations of letter‐sound and letter‐cluster‐sound correspondences. Word segmenting and blending, sound segmentation and blending, rhyming. Special orthography used to teach letter sounds: "the special orthography is a temporary convention used to highlight salient features of some letters; it provides visual cues to the child with RD such as symbols over long vowels (macrons), letter size variation, and connected letters to facilitate initial learning" (quote, p 337) word identification: "instruct children in the acquisition, use, and monitoring of different word identification strategies" (quote, p 338) Control: the CSS Program taught organisational strategies, academic problem solving, study and self‐help techniques. Children in the CSS programme received the same amount of individualised teacher attention as did children in the remedial reading programmes. Procedure: children received 35 hours of instruction (1‐hour sessions, 4 times/week) on a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio in special laboratory classrooms at a paediatric teaching hospital or in affiliated schools in the Toronto metropolitan area.
Outcomes	Time of post‐test: immediately after training completed Primary outcomes: non‐word reading accuracy (WJRMT: Word Attack subtest), regular word reading accuracy (experimental: 149 untrained regular words), and irregular word reading accuracy (experimental: 149 untrained exception words) Secondary outcomes: phoneme awareness (GFW Sound Symbol Tests: Sound Analysis subtest)
Notes	Contacted Frijters (on 4 October 2011) about means and SDs for reading measures from each of the 3 training conditions. We received an Excel file with means and SDs. Asked whether there was an overlap in participants across 1994, 1997, and 2000 papers published by their laboratory (n = 62 in 1994 paper, n = 122 in 1997 paper, and n = 166 in 2000 paper). It was confirmed that there was an overlap in participants between the papers. Therefore, we decided to only include the 2000 paper for this review to limit any over representation of the data in the final meta‐analysis. The second intervention group did the WIST Program. The WIST contained > 2 training components (word identification by analogy, seeking the part of the word that you know, attempting variable vowel pronunciations, 'peeling off' prefixes and suffixes in an multi‐syllabic word) and so was not included in this review. 2 measures tested Reading Accuracy: non‐words (GFW: Reading of Symbols and WJRMT‐R: Word Attack). We included the WJRMT‐R as it is a very widely used test with known reliability. There were multiple measures of phoneme awareness. We selected GFW sound analysis because it was well matched between groups before training. Study start and end dates: not reported Funding: "This article was supported by operating grants to Dr Lovett from the Ontario Mental Health Foundation, the Velleman Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Additional support for data analysis and manuscript preparation was provided by a Shannon Award to Dr Lovett and to Drs. Robin Morris and Maryanne Wolf from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and further supported by NICHD award No. 1 RO1 HD30970‐01 A2 to the same investigators" (quote, p 355). Declared/potential conflicts of interest: none reported
Risk of bias
Bias	Authors' judgement	Support for judgement
Random sequence generation (selection bias)	Low risk	Quote from publication: "the experimental design in which the original 166 children participated involved random assignment to one of three active treatment programs" (p 336). Quote from personal communication: "children were matched on decoding ability and then random number tables were used to randomly assign treatment to pair and to assign teacher to pair." Comment: best described as matching with randomisation.
Allocation concealment (selection bias)	Low risk	Quote from personal communication: "the PI assigned treatments and teachers to child pair based on participant identity alone. Neither children nor teachers would have had contact with the person doing the assignment, as all contact prior to this point was with study psychometrists." Comment: could not foresee assignment due to central allocation of participants to groups.
Blinding of participants and personnel (performance bias) All outcomes	Unclear risk	Quote from personal communication: "since this is a verbally‐administered intervention with quite explicit and structured content, and teachers were trained on the materials used, teachers could not be blind to the particular treatment they were teaching. Participants were not told what their assignments were, but on consent forms were told that they would participate in one of three conditions, with all conditions described. Teachers did not reveal condition to participants." Comment: 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	Quote from personal communication: "all standardized/norm referenced assessments were administered by trained psychometrists who were blind to assignment; however, some content‐related and experimental measures (e.g. the four word lists) were administered by teachers themselves at the pre‐specified testing intervals. In the former case, psychometrists would have had the participants name and testing folder alone, not the master subject‐list."
Incomplete outcome data (attrition bias) All outcomes	Low risk	Comment: extra data provided by author revealed that the data of all randomised participants were included in the analyses.
Selective reporting (reporting bias)	Unclear risk	Comment: data reported for all outcome measures outlined in methods; adequate detail for data to be included in analysis.
Other bias	Low risk	Comment: none apparent