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. Participants were divided into small groups depending on the levels of motivation. They participated in a five-step phase labeled A-B-C-D-E [Analyze/Browse/Create/Decision-Making/Evaluate] for problem solving. Results showed that the phase-specific analysis of ill-structured problem solving processes from the levels of motivation could decide the quality of their problem solving in subsequent phases.