Hi,
Yes that is the idea. This way you can view the current and the voltage across the coil at the same time. The extra resistance has to be kept small though, according to the current level, and does change the circuit a little bit, but it helps to understand these circuits by viewing the scope pics.
For a current of say 1 amp peak, you might use a 0.1 ohm resistor for example. The voltage across this resistor shows up on the scope and this represents the current as:
i(t)=v(t)/R
so that's pretty simple. For a 0.1 ohm resistor, this means that the voltage shown on the scope is really the current divided by 10. Multiplying that voltage by 10 then gives us the current. For example, if we see 0.1 volts peak on the scope, then that means that we actually have 0.1/0.1 which is 1 amp peak.
The voltage across the inductor, because of the way we connect the probe, shows up as the inverted voltage. No problem there if you have 'invert' function on your scope, but if you dont then we just invert it in our minds as we look at the scope pic. Graphically once you have a pic on the computer you can invert it by doing a graphical vertical flip.
Sometimes we get a lot of noise using the resistor method but it works when the budget is low. A current probe is nice to use but they are not that cheap to purchase.
Just to recap, what we want to do is view the voltage across the inductor and the current through it and then we can determine the inductance. The load can be varied to see how the inductor behaves with more load, as long as the transistor does not overheat.