In this video, Damion Jenkins of The Nurse Speak delivers an overview of the upcoming Next Generation NCLEX (NGN) and explains why it will not be dramatically harder than the current exam for well‑prepared candidates. He highlights two major structural changes: (1) the introduction of partial credit for select‑all‑that‑apply (SATA) items, allowing candidates to earn points for partially correct answers, and (2) the provision of laboratory reference ranges within the test, reducing the need for rote memorization of normal values. Jenkins stresses that success on the NGN still hinges on mastering the nursing process, critical‑thinking skills, and decision‑making frameworks rather than memorizing facts. He outlines the NCLEX’s new layered competence model, which evaluates candidates on environmental, task‑complexity, cultural, and individual factors, reflecting over a decade of research showing that new‑graduate errors stem from inadequate critical thinking. Jenkins critiques traditional nursing education for over‑reliance on fact‑drilling and argues that systematic teaching of critical‑thinking steps can better prepare students. Throughout, he promotes his own services—study guides, seminars, coaching, and consulting for students, educators, and organizations—positioning his approach as aligned with the NGN’s focus on applied reasoning. The video concludes with calls to action to visit his website, read his blog post on the NGN framework, and schedule calls for further assistance.
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Hi everyone, it's Damion Jenkins of The Nurse Speak NCLEX Strategies for Success. I'm coming to you to just give you a few updates on the Next Generation NCLEX for those of you who are concerned about the difficulty level of the new exam. For many of my clients and hopefully future clients, some of you are having a difficult time passing the current NCLEX test Plan. In fact, I've already helped over 2,800 repeat test takers develop strategies to pass the new exam— I'm sorry, the current exam— and I'm already working on helping individuals graduating from nursing programs to get ready to pass the Next Generation NCLEX. Even some of my clients who have been struggling to pass the current test plan are planning on testing again after April 1st of this year, 2023. So I have to work really diligently to make sure that everyone will be prepared for the Next Generation NCLEX. The good news is, is it's not very different in preparation. If you can think like a nurse, use the nursing process as a tool for critical thinking, know your strengths and limitations of your practice, are able to leverage what you know to be true and the rules, principles, and guidelines for decision-making, like the rules of prioritization, delegation, therapeutic communication, um, whether you're a PN and you're doing coordination of care, knowing your limitations in that practice. As a registered nurse and doing management of care, knowing your limitations in your practice. If you're able to kind of create this systematic approach in answering questions and you truly are intimate with an understanding of all of the rules that govern decision-making, there's no reason why you shouldn't be successful on the Next Generation NCLEX the same as the current test plan. So a few really good things to point out is that the Next Generation NCLEX is now going to be offering partial credit for your incorrect questions. So current test plan, let's say you have a SATA question, select all that apply, it has 6 options. If you don't get exactly the order in which they want you to get, then you get 0 points if you don't answer all of the, or if you don't check all of the answers that are correct. With Next Generation NCLEX, if you answer 3 of those correctly but you answer one incorrectly, then it's going to give you a total score of 2 points instead of 0. So this is really great news because for those of you who are really close on your select-all-that-apply questions, this gives you an upper hand where you have more opportunity to prove to the NCLEX that you are competent, but maybe you just forgot a little bit of the textbook information, which for years I've been stressing is not the priority. Textbook nursing knowledge, knowing every lab, every disease, every diagnostic is not the priority. The priority in being a great, safe, and effective nurse is knowing how to be a nurse, right? Understanding your place in the nursing process, understanding when you need to do more assessment or when you should implement and do an intervention or call for help or notify the physician of a change or how to respond appropriately when a patient is concerned about something. These are the key concepts that every person that I teach learns so that way they can go on and be successful past the NCLEX, which is only one singular measurement of competence. It really just measures your ability to pass a test, right? Your critical thinking capacity, your test-taking strategy, do do you know the concepts that govern decision-making? And are you able to prove to the NCLEX that you can slow down and be objective in your decision-making and not assume anything and not base your decisions on memory or emotion, right? So that's one really good news is that they're gonna start giving partial credit. Going back on what I was just saying about not needing to memorize everything, this is really important for the Next Gen NCLEX as well because now students and candidates are gonna have to do a lot less memorization. So with the current test plan, a lot of people have to memorize your reference ranges for your labs, right? If you don't know your potassium reference range, bottom low normal, upper top normal, if you don't know that, then you could potentially miss a question. But on the Next Gen NCLEX, they're gonna be providing reference ranges for you, for the test taker, which is huge. And we've been calling for this changed for a very long time, ever since we introduced electronic documentation, because their reference ranges can be easily looked up in a clinical setting. So if I'm at work and I'm trying to look up my patient's labs, it tells me what the normal values are anyway. So I, I have a lot less emphasis on memorizing those and a lot more emphasis on— now that I've identified that it's low or high, what I'm going to do about it is the essential piece of information that the NCLEX is now going to be So critical thinking is leveling up. Understanding your roles and responsibilities as the nurse is leveling up. We can no longer expect for people to be walking textbooks and be safe practitioners because you could be the smartest person in the world and know every definition, every lab, every diagnostic, and be honestly not a great nurse. I've seen them. I've worked with individuals who knew everything but just couldn't put it all together. They had terrible bedside manner. Maybe they didn't know how to respond. Uh, therapeutically to individuals. Uh, perhaps they made mistakes because they were overly analytical with the textbook version of everything having to be perfect in order to move on. And with the NCLEX, yes, we have to make decisions based on textbook nursing, but really it's about the information that's presented to us right then in that scenario. So those are two really important things that I wanted to point out about Next Gen NCLEX. It's not going impossible. The way that I've been teaching to help people pass the NCLEX is not changing. I'm not doing anything different. In fact, Next Gen NCLEX is making my job easier because it's a lot less memorization of certain facts that we have to focus on for people to be successful, especially if they've had long periods of time being out of a nursing program. Um, the other thing that I wanted to talk about is the reason why they've introduced this new framework for making sure that, um, we're measuring competence is because in the past we were kind of measuring, uh, candidates' ability to follow the nursing process and then to be able to recognize and recall information, understand why things are important, um, apply what they've learned, and then analyze, um, information to make decisions. Well, that's not changing. Those things are still going to be included in the NCLEX, and honestly, most of the Next Gen NCLEX is going to look exactly like the current NCLEX. The difference though, however, is these Next Gen question samples are going to allow the NCLEX to understand in a deeper meaning how well you make those decisions. Like, so instead of just simply following the nursing process or recognizing that something is different, they're now gonna be challenging your ability to place emphasis or significance on certain things like environmental factors, like the environment, client observations, resources available to you, medical records, consequences and risks of actions or inactions, time pressures. A lot of things time sensitive in nursing. Your task complexities, it's going to be able to level how difficult is one task versus the next. Cultural considerations. These are all like what they consider a layer 3 competence, like can you determine that these things are important to consider when you're making your decisions. And then there's also individual factors. And I keep looking at my screen because I have the framework posted so I can kind of read off of that. And I have an article on my blog that shows what this looks like for any of you who are interested. The title of the, um, article is Nurse Educators, Are You Ready for NCLEX? So whether you're a student or you're an educator, go there, read that article, because it's going to give you this framework work so that you can see how it's really leveling up and challenging you in a layered approach. Um, and then the individual factors is knowledge, skills, specialty, candidate characteristics, prior experiences, and level of experience. All of these are different components that determine someone's competence. Now it sounds like a lot, like why are they digging so deep to figure out how candidates are demonstrating ability? But this is based on more than 10 years worth of research that shows that most of the mistakes that happen happen from new graduate nurses. And the number one reason why those mistakes are happening is because the critical thinking component was not executed. Either the, the new grad nurse was overwhelmed with tasks and was so task-oriented that they didn't carefully think about the risks and the benefits and the consequences or even the process that all of us have to follow to make sure that we are delivering safe and effective care. And so because we have more than 10 years of research that shows this continues to be a problem, the NCLEX changed, as it does every 3 years, but they've been working on next generation NCLEX for a very long time. So another question people ask is, you know, even though we have a big nursing shortage and the pandemic has made everything worse, why didn't the NCSBN push the Next Gen NCLEX back. And honestly, it's like anything in life. If we just wait for the perfect time to start elevating our practice or elevating the way that we do things, then we'll never get there. And nurse educators for a very long time have been teaching nursing the same way. And I can speak from firsthand experience, not only as a nursing student once upon a time, but also as a nurse educator. I've been teaching nursing basically since I became a nurse, but I officially became a master's prepared registered nurse in the focus of nursing education in 2014, and I worked for several nursing programs, um, not only different organizations but also different levels of nursing. And honestly, it's been the same. And every time I come into those settings, I feel like it's recreating the wheel. We're using the same old methods for making sure that our students are getting the information. We're hitting them hard and heavy with a lot of facts, and we're not really seizing the moment to offer opportunity for stepping into the role of the nurse. We make them feel like they're students from day one. We make them feel like they're students when they're graduating. Never in the experience do we really help them to step into their power of being a nurse, owning the roles and responsibilities of the and being able to develop this systematic way of critically thinking from day one. We can teach this stuff. I've heard over the years as well that teaching critical thinking is difficult. No, it's not, because we have a very defined process that we should be using to go through the steps of critical thinking. And if we can teach that process and continuously challenge our students to demonstrate their ability to use the process then everyone learns faster and it takes a lot of the second-guessing out, takes a lot of the insecurities and intimidation out. It really helps to empower everyone. So that's what I've been doing for a very long time now. I know a lot of people still kind of view me as a baby nurse in the grand scheme of things because I do work with people who've been nurses for 30+ years. And hats off to you because you've helped pave the way for all of us. But I'm here and I am doing things in a way that shows success. All of my candidates who come through me, my clients, my students, even colleagues who I help teach how to run through this process, how to improve their ability to coach their students or coach their clients so that way they can find NCLEX success. The beautiful thing is, is it doesn't stop here at the NCLEX, right? Everything that I teach is transferable directly into practice. So if you can master these strategies and this way of critically thinking, then it's just gonna make you a better nurse, right? Because then you're going to be making informed decisions based on evidence, following a systematic system that really prevents you from making errors because you get distracted or you make assumptions about something, or you base your decisions on feelings because the emotional state of the situation is high. We have to remain objective so we can make safe and sound decisions, because when we are making decisions on behalf of other person, we're not allowed to use our own internalized beliefs, emotions, fears, any of these things. We have to make our decisions based on fact and what we know to be true. So if you have any other questions about Next Gen NCLEX, or if you want to just jump on a call with me, um, be a guest on my podcast, if you are a nurse leader, expert, educator, advocate, um, any which way, I have lots of talent, lots of experience where I help to serve you and your community. If you are looking to pass the NCLEX in the near future, you can always go to thenursespeak.com/passnclex. I have lots of things there for you. I have a study guide, I have in-person seminars, online seminars, the online NCLEX Strategies for Success program. Um, if you just have a few questions, you can always schedule an inquiry call with me. If you're a nurse educator, tutor, even NCLEX prep company, and you're just trying make sure that you're leveled up correctly for NCLEX, um, to make sure that your clients, students, or whomever you serve are going to be optimized for success, I would love to connect with you and see how I can help you or your organization, uh, leverage yourself for success. So thank you so much for taking the time to listen to this video. Again, go to thenursespeak.com/blog so you can see this framework and how the Next Gen NCLEX is really going to be challenging individuals. And for those of you who are going to be taking Next Gen NCLEX Um, the study guide that I posted has some really cool things in there about Next Gen, a lot of resources. Um, the test plan is available. You can go and do practice questions there. I have a lot of things available to help you level yourself up so you can find success, get your license, and join me in the ranks as a professional nurse. Take care, be well, and remember that nurses can do anything. I'll see you later.
