Early exploration on a community empowerment and engagement model for addressing at-risk students: A fuzzy Delphi approach

Abstract

At-risk students those facing academic failure, chronic absenteeism, or early school leaving due to interacting family, socioeconomic, and behavioral risk factors remain an enduring concern for education systems, yet intervention efforts are frequently confined to the school setting and lack systematic integration of community-based resources. This early exploratory study proposes and tests, through expert consensus, a Community Empowerment and Engagement Model (CEEM) for addressing at-risk students in the Malaysian context. Employing the Fuzzy Delphi Method (FDM), a purposively selected panel of eight experts drawn from community development, educational psychology, school counseling, social work, education policy, grassroots leadership, and clinical psychology evaluated twelve draft model items nested within six constructs. Expert judgments were captured on a seven-point linguistic scale, converted into Triangular Fuzzy Numbers (TFNs), and evaluated against a triple-criterion consensus rule: threshold value (d) ≤ 0.2, percentage of expert agreement (A) ≥ 75%, and fuzzy mean (M) > 0.5. Findings indicate consensus acceptance of nine items spanning family engagement, school-community partnership, mentorship, and early identification and referral, while three items relating to under-resourced community centers, narrowly targeted financial assistance, and app-only capacity-building training were rejected for insufficient consensus. Peer mentoring and structured parent-teacher communication emerged as the highest-ranked constructs. The study concludes that community empowerment and engagement, when systematically validated through expert consensus, offers a promising and contextually grounded framework for early, multi-sectoral intervention with at-risk students, and proposes this nine-item draft model as a foundation for subsequent large-scale validation.