- Delegation
- The process by which a registered nurse assigns appropriate tasks to other qualified team members, such as licensed practical nurses or nursing assistants, while retaining accountability for the outcome. Only stable, predictable tasks within the delegatee's competence may be delegated.
- Prioritization
- The skill of deciding which patient needs or interventions must be addressed first, often guided by frameworks such as the ABCs (airway, breathing, circulation) or Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It is central to many NCLEX questions about who to see or treat first.
- Nursing Process (ADPIE)
- A five-step systematic method for patient care consisting of Assessment, Diagnosis, Planning, Implementation, and Evaluation. It provides the logical order the exam expects when choosing the next nursing action.
- Therapeutic Communication
- Purposeful, patient-centered communication techniques—such as open-ended questions, reflection, and silence—used to build trust and encourage a patient to express feelings. NCLEX rewards responses that acknowledge the patient's emotions over those that give false reassurance or advice.
- SATA (Select All That Apply)
- A multiple-response question format in which more than one answer choice may be correct and the test-taker must select every correct option. Partial credit is generally not given, so all correct answers must be identified.
- NCLEX-RN
- The National Council Licensure Examination for Registered Nurses, a standardized computer-based exam that a nursing graduate must pass to obtain a license to practice as a registered nurse.
- Next Generation NCLEX (NGN)
- The updated version of the exam that adds case-study and clinical-judgment item types designed to measure a candidate's decision-making. It emphasizes applying knowledge to realistic patient scenarios rather than simple recall.
- Clinical Judgment Measurement Model (CJMM)
- The framework underlying the Next Generation NCLEX that breaks nursing decision-making into steps such as recognizing cues, analyzing them, prioritizing hypotheses, generating solutions, taking action, and evaluating outcomes.
- Scope of Practice
- The range of nursing activities a registered nurse is legally authorized and educationally prepared to perform, as defined by the state's nurse practice act. Acting outside it can result in disciplinary or legal consequences.
- Infection Control / Standard Precautions
- The baseline infection-prevention practices—such as hand hygiene, gloves, and safe handling of body fluids—applied to all patients regardless of diagnosis. Transmission-based precautions (contact, droplet, airborne) are added for specific pathogens.
- Client Needs Categories
- The four broad content areas the NCLEX-RN test plan is organized around: Safe and Effective Care Environment, Health Promotion and Maintenance, Psychosocial Integrity, and Physiological Integrity. Questions are distributed across these categories to test balanced competence.
- Computerized Adaptive Testing (CAT)
- An exam format in which the difficulty of each question adjusts to the test-taker's ability based on whether previous answers were correct. The exam continues selecting questions until it can reliably determine competence.