Ace the Cox Campus Challenge 2026 – Unleash Your Learning Superpowers!

The skill being tested is how you map a sound to its correct spelling pattern, focusing on the grapheme-phoneme relationship for the /dʒ/ sound. In wedge and judge, the final /dʒ/ sound is written with the digraph -dge, not with a single letter like j. The student’s spellings, we-j and ju-j, show they haven’t learned that after a short vowel, English commonly uses -dge to spell /dʒ/. Providing explicit instruction on this grapheme-phoneme rule helps the student encode the sound with the correct written form, which is the goal of encoding assessments. This isn’t about voicing differences, segmenting phonemes in general, or handling vowels in unstressed syllables.