This study investigates the processes through which achievement motivation guides the selection of coping strategies which in turn affects environmental mastery post-failure feedback. Seventy-six college students received failure feedback after completing a professional aptitude test. Findings showed that gender moderated the relationship between Hope of Success (HS) and planful problem-solving coping but not between HS and escape-avoidance coping. No moderated mediation was found when HS was used to predict environmental mastery with gender as the moderator and either planful problem-solving or escape-avoidance coping as the mediator. Simple mediation analyses showed that planful problem-solving did not mediate the relationship between HS and environmental mastery. Instead, higher scores on HS predicted lower use of escape-avoidance coping which in turn predicted higher environmental mastery. Implications for the role of feedback in educational settings are discussed.