Educational researchers should expand their methodology to include the student's voice and to consider the impact of the student's environment when defining being "at-risk of failure" or "at-risk of dropping out of school." Current definitions of who is at-risk place the onus of at-riskness entirely within the student. Researchers have approached the notion of at-riskness from an epidemiological framework, which results in definitions based on characteristics of populations and which fail to regard individual voices within those populations. Several scholars, however, have attempted to alter the current trend of framing at-riskness from the epidemiological model. Educators and researchers need to acknowledge the importance of the environment as a factor in being identified as at-risk. Grounded in systems theory, at-riskness can be conceptualized as a set of cogs or spheres (representing the external factors of sociocultural, community, schooling processes, and family) with the internal factors of the student in the center. These spheres can rotate at different rates as the intensity of the interaction of the student with various external factors change. Such a model may add to the present conversation on defining and determining who is at-risk. (Contains 15 references and a figure illustrating a conceptualization of at-riskness.) (RS)