The long‐term effects of phonemic awareness training in kindergarten were evaluated by studying various aspects of reading, spelling, and oral phonological skills in school. In the kindergarten‐part of the study 95 children divided into three experimental and two control groups took part. One year later 83 of them were identified and tested in school. The children who participated in the phonemic training program seemed to have benefited from it to some extent. At least they improved their scores on phonemic synthesis tests in school. Some children in the middle and high range of pretest performance seem to have avoided a risk for reading failure to a greater extent than the corresponding children in the control groups. It is suggested that phonemic training contributes to the development of accurate concepts of reading in the preschool child and makes the child less confused when confronted with formal reading instruction in school. Great variances, ceiling effects, and group heterogeneity created many difficulties in evaluating the training effects. The various methodological problems implied in evaluation research with nonequivalent control group design were analysed and illustrated with data from the present resea