The Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) Theory classifies cognitive skills within seven clusters of abilities that demonstrate moderate to highly significant correlations to academic achievement skills.

Gifted students often have strong fluid reasoning skills. Specifically, fluid reasoning refers to the mental operations that an individual uses when faced with a relatively novel task that cannot be performed automatically.

Fluid reasoning is the ability to solve new/unusual problems without relying completely on past experiences and information. Fluidreasoning is related to math achievement, written expression, and to a lesser degree, reading skills.

CHC theory is a hierar- chical framework of human cognitive abilities that consists of three strata: general intelligence, or g (stratum III), broad cognitive abilities (stratum II), and narrow cognitive abilities (stra- tum I).

Reading: Fluid reasoning or reasoning abilities have been shown to play a moderate role in reading. For example, the ability to reach general conclusions from specific information is important for reading comprehension. Math: Fluid reasoning is related to mathematical activities at all ages.

In keeping with the CHC nomenclature, the five areas previously identified as important in reading achievement are the broad CHC factors: auditory processing (e.g., auditory discrimination, perception, and the manipulation of sound), short-term memory (e.g., immediate memory, phonological memory, and working memory), ...