Effort Quantified?

 I have been reflecting recently on two kinds of performance "standards" that I have experienced in my school years. The first relates to a kind of output, be it a test score, essay, work of art, etc., which demonstrates to the teacher my attainment or mastery of a subject matter. The second performance relates more to how well I make the material "my own"; that is, how well I truly learn the material. These two are not necessarily the same. For example, there are times when a person does exactly as they should for a teacher, but they do not necessarily internalize the meaning of the course work. I once took a course in programming in which I managed to memorize the examples of how to write a simple financial program, finding out later that the test is exactly a reflection of what I memorized. However, I am not sure if I can say I truly learned anything from the exercise, because it's not so easy to say whether I could have applied the same principles of the course to a completely new program or scenario.
  In the second kind of performance, I am not looking only at my output, but am also looking at what I really took to heart or how I was transformed by the experience. This is not so easy to measure or evaluate. I wonder if perhaps the only way that this can be done is to actually get the student to reflect on the process and what they learned. I am noticing that when I am replying to different posts for my current online course, I often find myself "retracing" my steps to ensure that I am really aware of what I am writing and whether it's based on the readings from the course. I find that this way, I reinforce the material and also deeply reflect on what my understanding or opinion of the material is. I think the same process of reflection might even be applied to writing a computer program. In writing what I learned, I am actually making "known" to myself what I learned, and this takes the act beyond simply performance. It makes it into an active "reflecting on" my connection with the activity. I would like to see more of this reflective process being used throughout curricula.