Couples in remarriages with stepchildren are a significant portion of the marriage population and have unique educational needs regarding aspects of couple functioning within the context of stepfamily development. From a review of the literature, we examine current curricula focused on these couples. Information is offered on implementation issues regarding recruitment, delivery context, facilitator and participant characteristics, and evaluation.

Adolescent-focused marriage education is a relatively uncharted research area. Using a quasi-experimental design, this study examined the effectiveness of an adapted version of the curriculum entitled, Love U2: Increasing Your Relationship Smarts with an economically, geographically, and racially diverse sample of 340 high school students. Findings suggest that participants showed increases in 5 dimensions of their relationship knowledge, including their ability to identify unhealthy relationship patterns. Participants also had more realistic beliefs about relationships/marriages and reported lower levels of verbal aggression use at postprogram compared to controls. Moreover, these findings existed across race, household income, and family structure type, with all participating students benefiting in similar ways. Implications for future programming and research are discussed.

We examine the relative importance of facilitator and facilitation characteristics on participant ratings of a stepfamily education program. Data from 48 facilitators and 598 participants suggest that quality facilitation is more meaningful to participants than whether facilitators have comparable demographic characteristics or life experiences. Hierarchical regressions identified time management effective use of personal experiences, and clear explanation of material as key facilitation skills. Popular assumptions about participant-facilitator similarity and implications for programming are discussed. EducationAs the research illustrating the benefits of couple and relationship education (CRE) accumulates (Hawkins, Blanchard, Baldwin, & Fawcett, 2008), and as government support of marriagestrengthening programs increases (Brotherson & Duncan, 2004), so too has there been a growing recognition that participant characteristics have programmatic implications (Adler-Baeder

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