Sticks and stones will break my bones but failure feedback may not hurt me: gender differences in the relationship between achievement motive, coping strategies and environmental mastery

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• hope of success motivation
• coping strategies
• environmental mastery
• failure feedback
• gender differences

Acknowledgement

This research was supported in part by funding from Nanyang Technological University to Ser Hong Tan under the Undergraduate Research Experience on CAmpus (URECA) programme.