for our study we need to find counterparts for the treatment and control groups in among students in lower secondary schools in or this can be achieved with matching methods where counterfactual scores are constructed using scores of students with similar characteristics to those observed in t usually matching methods are used to make control and treatment groups more comparable assuming that we have the same observations in each group in and t in our case we do not want to adjust for dissimilarities among treatment and control groups we know that students who were in vocational schools differed from those in general schools but we are interested in whether moving students from different tracks who differ by assumption into the onetype comprehensive lower secondary schools affected them similarly