VR in education and the use of headsets in the classroom is a hot topic in education and training, being identified as a strategy to motivate, engage and potentiate effective learning of students of the 21st century. The benefits, impact and challenges arising from the use and integration of VR technologies (and headsets) in education are widely documented in the literature and object of some studies, existing a lack of consensus and concern related to inadequate use of these tools, possible negative effects of its use in young people and about the effective impact of these technologies on students’ learning. Some research shows that VR-based 3D environments have the potential to foster empathy and empathic concern, besides being an appealing medium for wider audiences (Barreda-Ángeles et al., 2020). In this context, empathy is defined as the awareness of the feelings and emotions of other people and how we as individuals understand what others are experiencing as if we were feeling it ourselves. At a deeper level, defining, understanding, and reacting to the concerns and needs underlying others’ emotional responses and reactions (Goleman 2005). Furthermore, in psychological science, researchers distinguish cognitive empathy from emotional empathy. Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand and recognize that individuals have different beliefs and experiences. On the other hand, affective empathy involves sharing an emotional response with another person when triggered by their emotions (Martingano et al., 2021). Considering all this, some researchers mention that one of the limitations of the current use of VR in education is the fact that many kinds of VR experiences can improve emotional empathy, but not cognitive empathy, since cognitive empathy may require more effortful engagement, such as using one’s imagination to construct others’ experiences (Martingano et all, 2021).

This is the starting point of the VR4Empathy - Using virtual reality for inclusive and action-oriented empathy in schools, a European project co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme (project nr. 101132844) aiming at designing, testing and scaling up an innovative solution to promote the adoption of Virtual Reality (VR) fostering the cognitive empathy in students.

This initiative will be supported by a quality assurance framework, aiming to improve the quality and inclusiveness of digital education across the EU, through the:
- Development of VR-based educational resources for students to approach European historical facts, European social common values and European citizenship and diversity
- Test and validation of the VR-based educational resources in the schools of the EdTech Network
- Production of policy recommendations for the adoption of VR-based educational resources in the classrooms of the countries of the consortium

The methodology behind the project integrates co-independent phases, including research, development, testing/validation and mainstreaming, with bottom-up co-design methods, involving participants from the educational sector, business and technological sector, policy sector and the school community.

At this stage, the consortium is concluding the research phase, and producing two main documents: a catalogue of good practices of VR in education and a global research report, presenting the results from the literature review and inputs provided by teachers and students from Portugal, Slovenia and Greece through surveys and workshops.

Keywords: Virtual reality in education, cognitive empathy, emotional empathy.