The Reissner-Mindlin plate model is one of the most commonly used models of a moderate-thick to thin elastic plate. However, a direct finite element approximation usually yields very poor results, which is referred to LOCKING phenomenon.

In the past two decades, many efforts have been devoted to the design of locking free finite elements to resolve this model, most of these work focus on triangular 

or rectangular elements, the latter may be extended to parallelograms, but very few on quadrilaterals.

In this talk we will give an overview of the recent development of low order quadrilateral elements and present some new results.