A state-of-the-art report on the new finite elements formulated by the addition of nonconforming displacement modes has been presented. The development of a series improved nonconforming finite elements for the analysis of plate and shell structures is described in the first part of this paper. These new plate and shell finite elements are established by the combined use of different improvement schemes such as; the addition of nonconforming modes, the reduced (or selective) integration, and the construction of the substitute shear strain fields. The improvement achieved may be attributable to the fact that the merits of these improvement techniques are merged into the formation of the new elements in a complementary manner. It is shown that the results obtained by the new elements give significantly improved solutions without any serious defects such as; the shear locking, spurious zero energy mode for the linear as well as nonlinear benchmark problems. Recent developments in the transition elements that have a variable number of mid-side nodes and can be effectively used in the adaptive mesh refinement are presented in the second part. Finally, the nonconforming transition flat shell elements with drilling degrees of freedom are also presented.