Savage 2003.

Methods	Randomised controlled trial 3 intervention groups (phonics + phonemes, phonics + rimes, phonics + mixed) and 1 control group (untrained)
Participants	Location/setting: 9 schools in the London Borough of Sutton, UK Criteria: 108 year 1 children across 9 schools with the lowest scores on screening tests for phonological awareness (nursery rhymes, rhyme matching, rhyme generation, blending, segmentation) and reading (nonsense word reading, word reading and spelling, letter‐sound knowledge); English speaking Recruits: 108 English‐speaking readers in year 1 were selected. Sex: 64 males; 44 females Mean age: 5 years 9 months (SD not reported; range 5 years 0 months to 6 years 3 months) Ethnicity: not reported Sample size: 104 year 1 children Allocation: "within each school, children were allocated to an intervention condition (usually nine children) or to a control condition (usually three children)" (quote, p 219). Personal communication: ''this was done using an (online) random number generator set with parameters 1‐4, for each school allowing placing into each of the interventions...Child‐level allocation to intervention versus control within each school was again undertaken using random number generator" (quote). Intervention groups: phonics + phonemes: n = 26 (sex, mean age, SD, and range not reported) phonics + rimes: n = 26 (sex, mean age, SD, and range not reported) phonics + mixed: n = 26 (sex, mean age, SD, and range not reported) Control group: n = 26 (sex, mean age, SD, and range not reported)
Interventions	Interventions: "... in each session, all children started with letter‐sound learning activities using a range of multi‐sensory approaches (e.g. saying, looking, tracing) to learn letter sounds supported by the Jolly Phonics stories and actions" (quote, p 53); and "principles of segmenting and blending with a limited number of sounds" (quote, p 53). This was followed by 10‐minutes of training on phonemes (for the phoneme training group), on rimes (for the rime training group) or on both (for the mixed training group). This, in turn, was followed by 5 minutes of phonological awareness training: "games tailored to phonemes or rhymes respectively" (quote, p 53). From this point in each session, the training varied between intervention groups. phonics + phonemes: trained with SoundWorks: an 'a‐board'; writing on lines (with 'slips' and 'foldovers': cards with vowel markers or spaces to write vowels); 'spelling from your head'; 'read the word'; and 'sound it out' with an adult. phonics + rimes: practiced rimes with plastic letters along with writing words, simple word searches, using onset rime 'word fans', sorting words into '‐an' and '‐at' groups and using onset sound frames (depicted as elements in a picture of a caterpillar's body). phonics + mixed: did a mixture of the 2 interventions above along with analysing words using their phonemic elements (e.g. 'at' made up of 'a' and 't') and using phonemes and rimes in word building. Control: "children remained in class and undertook the word‐level work appropriate to the second term of Year 1 of the National Literacy Strategy in their normal fashion" (quote, p 55). Procedure: LSAs conducted training in small groups (typically 4 children per group – as per email from Savage on 30 November 2011). 20‐minute sessions, 4 times/week, for a period of 9 weeks at school.
Outcomes	Time of post‐test: not stated explicitly but appeared to be immediate. Primary outcomes: non‐word reading accuracy (experimental: high rime non‐words and low rime non‐words), regular word reading accuracy (experimental: 6 regular words), regular word spelling (experimental: 6 regular words), letter‐sound knowledge (experimental: "two sets of cards each containing 13 of the 26 letters of the alphabet presented one letter per card" (quote, p 218)), and phoneme awareness (experimental: onset‐rime segmentation).
Notes	Similar design to Savage 2003 but done on a new sample of the same size (personal communication from Robert Savage on 30 November 2011) Contacted Savage about: dropouts (on 24 January 2012): 4 dropouts, 1 from each group training group size (on 11 February 2012): typically 4 in each training group Since the 3 intervention groups all consisted of phonics and phonological awareness training, we have used the combined mean scores (and SDs) at pre‐ and post‐tests (see Table 3, p 222). 2 tests used to measure reading accuracy: non‐words (high rime non‐words and low rime non‐words). These 2 tests were normed. 3 tests used to measure phoneme awareness: rime matching, onset‐rime segmentation, and phoneme segmentation. We included the onset‐rime segmentation as its intervention and control pretest scores had the best match. Study start and end dates: not reported Funding: financial support provided by the JJ Trust and the Helen Arkell Dyslexia Association 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: "within each school, children were allocated to an intervention condition (usually nine children) or to a control condition (usually three children). Schools themselves decided on the precise composition of each of the subgroups of three to four children who went together with an LSA for each intervention session based upon their knowledge of the children's social networks, so intervention groups varied slightly in size across schools" (p 219). Quote from personal communication: "this was done using an (online) random number generator set with parameters 1–4, for each school allowing placing into each of the interventions. Schools decided on suitability of children for intervention (as we note on page 219), though only 1 child was removed on teacher request. Child‐level allocation to intervention versus control within each school was again undertaken using random number generator. However schools decided the precise composition of (the already selected) intervention child groups to create groups of children who got on well" (Savage 2003). Quote from personal communication: "the allocation was random at school and student‐level. The composition of small groups of children WITHIN the allocated random conditions was (and I recall, was very occasionally) adjusted only on the suggestion of classroom teachers to make the groups more functional at the social level (an e.g. I recall is a particular group of 4 randomly‐allocated kids which included 3 'noisy' boys and a very shy girl), thus we might move the groups a bit for the delivery of the intervention. The initial randomisation was always respected. It was to avoid major problems that we would do this rather than to find groups who particularly got on, hence it was rare this happened. The key point is that the initial randomisation of condition was always intact, the grouping for the purpose of intervention delivery was occasionally adjusted" (Savage 2003).
Allocation concealment (selection bias)	Low risk	Quote from personal communication: "I did this allocation independent of those running the study and of co‐author(s) Carless and Stuart. Carless led the TA training, so I judge allocation to be concealed, and not possible to predict". Comment: could not foresee assignment due to central allocation of participants to groups.
Blinding of participants and personnel (performance bias) All outcomes	Low risk	Quote from publication: ''teachers were told who the control children and intervention children were, and were also reinforced at training and during the intervention to treat the control children in the same way as they would if no intervention was taking place for other children" (p 221). 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	Quote from personal communication: "Pre‐testing was undertaken as a screen of all children in schools before we identified and allocated the ‘at‐risk readers’, (see Consort flow diagrams in both papers) so in this sense it is entirely blind... There was no blinding of post‐testing in relation to the intervention condition as TAs did both (though see comments above on the 3 horse race). However classroom assistants also did not know of the theoretical contrasts (and they were definitely blind to the status of the high‐rime and low‐rime non‐words in the 2003 study as these were randomised as a set of 12 items for pre‐testing and post‐testing). TAs were not told at any point of any research predictions regarding the relationship between intervention and outcome (e.g. hypothesis of possible link between phoneme‐based intervention and raise phoneme awareness at post‐test, and similar for rimes etc.)."
Incomplete outcome data (attrition bias) All outcomes	Low risk	Comment: 4 dropouts – 1 in each of the 4 groups
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