Savage 2005.

Methods	Randomised controlled trial 3 intervention groups (phonics + phonemes, phonics + rhymes, 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: 54 males and 54 females Mean age: not reported Ethnicity: not reported Sample size: 52 year 1 children Allocation: the same as Savage 2003. That is random allocation of schools to 1 of 4 groups: 3 intervention groups (1 doing phoneme training, 1 doing rhyme training, and 1 doing a mix of both) and 1 control group (untrained). And then random allocation of children to treatment and control groups within schools. Since the 3 interventions trained phonics and phonological awareness, their data were merged for the Intervention group. Intervention groups: phonics + phonemes: n = 26 (sex, mean age, SD, and range not reported) phonics + rhymes: 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 rhymes (for the rhyme 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 + rhymes: practiced rhymes with plastic letters along with writing words, simple word searches, using onset rhyme '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 rhymes 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: the week after training was completed Primary and secondary outcomes: letter‐sound knowledge (experimental: "cards with 26 individual letters on them" (quote, p. 51) and phoneme awareness (experimental: nursery rhymes, rhyme matching, rhyme generation, blending and segmentation; see note 2 below)
Notes	Contacted Savage (on 24 January 2012) about what measured phonological awareness and letter sounds, and on 11 February 2012 about decoding and training group sizes. Replied that phonological awareness was measured by nursery rhymes, rhyme matching, rhyme generation, blending and segmentation; letter sounds was measured by 1 experimental test; and decoding skills was measured by nonsense word reading, word reading and spelling, and letter‐sound knowledge. We asked for the individual scores for each of these tests however he only had combined scores. Finally, training groups typically had 4 children each We used the combined score for phonological awareness in our analysis. We did not use the decoding skills measure because it was a mixed of multiple skills that we used in this review as separate outcomes. Study start and end dates: not reported Funding: financial support for the collaboration and execution of the project provided by the JJ Trust and the Helen Arkell Dyslexia Association. Financial support for the analysis and revision of the work provided by McGill University new researcher start‐up fund no. 100810. Declaration/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: "a quasi‐random allocation of schools to programs was undertaken: four schools whose catchment areas were known to draw primarily from lower SES backgrounds were each allocated to separate intervention groups. After that, for the other schools the allocation was entirely arbitrary... Children were, however, entirely arbitrarily allocated to an intervention condition (nine children) or to a control condition (three children)... As the allocation of children to intervention condition was not entirely arbitrary, but contained a systematic element..." (p 552). Quote from personal communication: "The same [as the Savage 2003 study] except that 4 schools of known low socio‐economic status were each randomly allocated to one of the 4 groups first, using a random number generator. Then the process was repeated as above for all remaining schools. Child‐level allocation was again undertaken using random number generator."
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 55). Quote from personal communication: "The TAs delivered [the training] based on sub‐lexical phonological unit taught (rimes or phonemes) and this content is quite visible in the ‘treatment’ (no equivalent to a pill or placebo an option here). The one aspect that was blind was that we emphasized to TAs and all other school staff that each of the interventions (rime phoneme or mixed) was a proven evidence‐based intervention, so we cast it as 3‐horse race between them (with no favoured intervention) at all times, and emphasized the need for a 'fair‐test' of each. TAs understood this. At the participant end, these are 6 years olds in both studies. They simply knew they were in an intervention (intervention condition children only of course) or receiving regular classroom teaching (control group children)." 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: "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 .... 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	Quote from publication: "One child per intervention group was unavailable, having moved away from the LSA in the interim between pre‐ and post‐test" (p 55). Comment: both groups experienced the same (relatively low) dropout rate.
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

BAS: British Ability Scales; CC2: Castles and Coltheart 2; CSS: Classroom Survival Skills; DF: degrees‐of‐freedom; FSIQ: Full Scale IQ; GFW: Goldman‐Fristoe‐Woodcock; GPC: grapheme‐to‐phoneme correspondence; GV: garden variety; IQ: intelligence quotient; LSA: Learning Support Assistant; MinimPy: minimisation program; n: number of participants; PhAB: phonological analysis and blending; PI: principal investigator; RAN: rapid automatised naming; RD: reading difficulties; SD: standard deviation; SES: socioeconomic status; TA: teacher assistant; TOWRE: Test of Word Reading Efficiency; WIAT‐II: Wechsler Individual Achievement Test Second Edition; WIST: Word Identification Strategy Training; WJRMT: Woodcock‐Johnson Reading Mastery Test; WJTA‐III: Woodcock‐Johnson Test of Achievement III; WRAT‐R: Wide Range Achievement Test; WRMT‐R: Woodcock Reading Mastery Test‐Revised.