UNCG Assistant Professor Eric Drollette begins each semester in the same, unexpected way. He asks, “Does anybody here get up at 4 a.m. to milk cows?”
His question reminds students that academic success can arise from a variety of backgrounds. It was Drollette’s own childhood experience working on his family’s dairy farm that sparked his interest in the benefits of exercise.
“I was always manually working and spending so much time farming that it was hard to manage school at the same time, but I still succeeded,” says Drollette. “I began to wonder if there is a connection between movement and the way we think.”
The first in his family to attend college, he has now carved out a valuable area of study as a UNCG faculty member investigating how short bursts of exercise can impact children’s brains and cognitive health.
His latest study aims to turn research into real-world impact in classrooms.
“I’m interested in the effects of exercise on the brain and how we think, particularly with children,” Drollette says. “More so now than before, children are becoming more inactive, and there’s a lot of things for children to do other than moving and playing.”
Big impacts from brief exercise
Children scored significantly higher on a standardized test measuring verbal comprehension following just nine minutes of classroom-friendly exercises. Above, Drollette’s lab demonstrates their exercise and EEG measurement procedures with a non-study participant, age 10.
Dr. Drollette’s research adds to the growing body of literature supporting the benefits of exercise for children, including within the context of school.
“Physical education and physical activity are good for our rising generation. It’s good for mental health. It’s good for brain health and academic achievement,” he says. “What can we do to fit it into their daily lives?”
Incorporating exercise into a child’s day is a matter of increasing significance as recess time is reported to have declined in some schools. At the same time, many elementary schools are advocating teachers give students regular movement breaks.
Past studies have investigated more involved exercises, requiring equipment like treadmills, but these types of movement are challenging to do in a classroom. Drollette and his collaborators studied whether just nine minutes of desk-side-friendly exercises could improve children’s academic performance.
Their short sequence of exercises includes high knees, jumping jacks, lunges, and air squats. Children aged 9-12 years performed each for 30 seconds followed by 30 seconds of rest in a laboratory.
As Drollette and his collaborators published in Psychology of Sport & Exercise, when 25 students engaged in this brief high-intensity interval exercise, they scored significantly higher on a standardized test measuring verbal comprehension compared to when they sitting and watching an educational video before taking the test.
“Teachers and educators that I talk to look at that and say, ‘Wow, there’s something I can do that’s not that long that can actually improve children’s academic performance,’” says Drollette.
“I get a lot of surprise on the public end that something so simple and so short can be so impactful in a classroom.”
In the study, the researchers also examined a type of brain neuroelectrical activity, error-related negativity, that is observed when people make a mistake. High error-related negativity is associated with mental distraction in the form of greater fixation on the error, Drolette explains. The child’s focus suffers and so does their performance.
“With interval exercise, we actually see this decrease in this error-related brain response. When a child made an error, they were better able to effectively respond to the error in a mentally healthy way.”
STRENGTH IN COMMUNITY
The team, which includes graduate students Praveen Pasupathi and Bryan Montero-Herreras pictured above, saw a drop in error-related negativity after the exercise.
Drollette says UNCG’s Department of Kinesiology has been a great fit for him.
“The department has a strong exercise psychology emphasis. We now have an applied program and an online master’s program and a handful of us that do exercise psychology research. Plus, so many other great faculty that support each other in the department.”
“That is why I love working at UNCG – I’m among such great people.”
He and his team recruit children from Greensboro and the surrounding community to visit his laboratory – a spacious former classroom now equipped with an open area for exercising and electroencephalogram equipment – and participate in research studies.
While recruiting research participants is notoriously difficult, Drollette says UNCG’s strong connection to the community helps.
“A lot of times families will come in for the study and say, ‘My son graduated from here first generation or my husband went here because they’re local.’”
In 2024, Drollette won both the Outstanding Teacher and Outstanding Mentor awards in the School of Health and Human Sciences,.
One of his favorite parts of his job is celebrating his students’ success and growth, from an undergraduate’s winning poster at UNCG’s 2025 Thomas Undergraduate Research and Creativity Expo to a graduate student’s stellar dissertation.
It’s easy for him to see his past self – a college student with drive but a good deal of self-doubt – in his students.
“I can be that person that says, ‘Don’t think negatively about yourself. Don’t think you’re an imposter here because you managed and you did well. Keep going with it,'” he says.
“So, I try to relate my background to the students that I mentor.”
Story by Rachel Damiani
Photography by Sean Norona
