Various schools agree that summer is the optimal period for learning; however, they are indecisive over the issue of designating teacher-designed or student-designed projects as the prominent method for students to prepare for the next school year. Many teachers spend time creating projects for students to ensure students have an adequate grasp for their oncoming course. Additionally, schools mirror the success of other schools by attributing the idea of summer projects into their own curriculum. Students often procrastinate on summer projects because the summer projects do not captivate their attention, and they view the assignment only as a complementary task. While some schools may argue that teacher-designed projects align with the concepts addressed in class, student-designed projects enable students to discover ideas individually and increase retention time for them.

Student-designed projects provoke a stronger understanding of a topic because students spend time garnering information and relating it with current events. For example, incoming A.P. Spanish students need to familiarize themselves with content which relates to the themes covered in the class. They may design a poster for each theme by organizing current events under an example column and summarizing the most pertinent details found from their research. Student-designed projects benefit students because students are inspired to conduct research on the topic, and students are not limited to guidelines. They promote a higher capacity for creativity because students expand beyond the parameters of the subject and force students to actively engage with the project. The flexibility of student-designed projects can cover a topic more comprehensive than teacher-designed projects because they stretch beyond just the bare bones of a topic. Semantic encoding, the act of obtaining memories by relating information directly to the source, increases retention time because the students grapple with the topic, and they encode the information to long-term memory. By storing the information in long-term memory, students can prolong the retention curve, a graph that depicts an increase in memory loss as time increases.

Teacher-designed projects provide a snapshot of the course because they contain significant elements that are modeled after the course's itinerary. At the end of the school year, tenth grade English teachers dish out a list of recommended books to give students a head start on the book review project due shortly after the break. The book review project requires identifying the author's argument and tone which helps students develop the skills required for the analytic essay component of the A.P. Language and Composition exam. Teacher-designed projects expose students to a strict interpretation which allow students to extrapolate the necessary ideas and disregard the trivial details. They are not intensive to complete because their primary function is to spark interest with students and are merely a precursor to the course. Although they may abide by the topics of a course, they fail to prepare students for the challenges of the course. On the contrary, student-designed projects require huge amounts of effort and incorporate additional information that can allow students to gain a deeper understanding than teacher-designed projects. Teacher-designed projects can limit the perspective of students because they follow the same perspective of the teacher who designed it; meanwhile, student-designed projects can allow students to gain a global perspective of the topic and de-emphasize the focus of students on themselves but on other issues occurring throughout the world.

Although schools utilize teacher-designed projects for summer learning because they stay within the confines of the teacher's syllabus, student-designed projects are ideal in fostering intellectual growth for students because students are permitted to seek a plethora of sources which enhances their learning and they strengthen their retention of the subject due to constant exposure with the material. In a foreign language class, students are given the opportunity to design their own projects. As such, they expand on their Spanish comprehension because they rely on their own research to provide prototypes that can be incorporated into the course, and their homework is easier because they can cite current events as examples in their essays. In an English class, students are given a teacher-designed project to experience the superficial concepts of the course. The lack of challenge offered by teacher-designed projects is devastating to a student's mastery of a course and impacts the view that students have on a topic because they may be biased at a certain topic. One effective way to implement student-designed projects is to provide a list of the topics covered in a course and allow students to approach the project by choosing the format that suits them rather than a rigid structure that may put off students from completing the task.