Retrospective
The goal of a retrospective research is to investigate a previously occurring event, occurrence, or circumstance. A retrospective education research topics can only gather data in one of two ways: the investigator obtains data from written material such as books, magazines, newspapers, diaries, and other personal documents, or he questions respondents who can recollect the situation. Inquiring into the issue with the responders is only practicable if the incident occurred within a specific time period in the past; if the event occurred decades or years ago, the investigator will have to rely on written documents.

Prospective
The prospective research design investigates the long-term consequences of a phenomena, situation, programme, attitude, or problem. Because the investigator's goal is to wait for the influence of a programme or a circumstance to see the results on the target population, most prospective research designs are also characterised as experimental studies. Unlike retrospective research, prospective studies utilise field or laboratory trials to investigate results afterwards. The conclusions reached as a consequence of these research findings can then be extrapolated to similar events in the future.

Review
Retrospective-prospective studies look back at something that happened in the past and look forward to it. These studies differ from before-and-after studies solely in that there is no control group. The majority of before-and-after studies that don't include a control group are retrospective-prospective research. In a retrospective-prospective research topics , the investigator gathers data on the population before the intervention or treatment is used, and then investigates the same population after the intervention or treatment has had its effect on that population. The researcher does not conduct a baseline analysis and does not use a control group.