Background:
This article examines the use and application of an ill-structured problem to pre-service elementary teachers in Korea in order to find implications of pre-service teacher education with regard to contextualized problem solving by analyzing experiences of ill-structured problem solving.

Material and methods:
Participants were divided into small groups depending on the level of motivation. They participated in a five-step phase labeled A-B-C-D-E [Analyze-Browse-Create-Decision making-Evaluate] for problem solving evaluations.

Results:
Result showed that the phase-specific analysis of ill-structured problem solving processes from the level of motivation could decide the quality of their problem solving in subsequent phases.

Conclusions:
There is a strong need to recognize the necessity of developing problems based on a realistic situational context in pre-service teacher education, and to offer opportunities to mathematize I-S problems to further identify the mathematical potential from everyday math.